Subscribe (RSS)Wow. The Associated Press recently ran with an article detailing how Nielson will be dropping pageviews as a meaningful site metric. More interesting than that tidbit of news, though, is the supreme lack of technical expertise from the AP Reporter covering the article, Anick Jesdanun:
“Currently, sites and advertisers often use page views, a figure that reflects the number of Web pages a visitor pulls from a site. However, Yahoo Inc. and others are increasingly using a software trick called Ajax to improve the user experience. It allows sites to update data automatically and continually, without users needing to pull up new pages.” (emphasis mine)
A “software trick called Ajax”? Did the reporter in question even bother to research the story details? For those who have been locked in a closet for the past few years or have some other good reason for not knowing what AJAX is: AJAX is an acronym for Asychronous Javascript and XML. It is an application of Javascript, a client-side scripting language, not a language in an of itself. In fact, AJAX is, most simply, centered around a single Javascript class, XMLHttpRequest. XMLHttpRequest allows the retrieval of remote documents, principally XML documents, once the page has already been loaded. This means that content can be delivered on the fly, without a page refresh, which opens up a whole world of possibilities that were previously only pipe-dreams. ‘AJAX’ as a term, simply describes this process - i.e. the ‘asynchronous’ retrieval of external data that most normally falls in either the Javascript or XML categories.
What is most frightening to me is that anyone who hangs around on the web for more than 5 minutes should have at least heard the term before, and one would think that an Internet writer for the Associate Press would have even more familiarity with the concept. Even more disheartening is the absolute ease of finding out more about AJAX even if you knew nothing about it. Google ‘ajax’ and the first hit is a Wikipedia article that would at least provide enough understanding to realize that it’s not a ’software trick’.
Maybe I’m making too much of this. I have a penchant for doing that. Nevertheless, there’s really no excuse for such a glaring error, especially when it comes to what is supposed to be the World’s authoritative news source. </rant>
