I'm a minimalist. I have a conservative style. 'Less is more', that kind of thing. Because of my style and preferences, I've been turned off of AJAX for many things. I think there are great uses of it, such as Google Maps and Facebook's interface, but people are going overboard. In extreme cases, AJAX is destroying an integral technology of the web: URIs.

URIs, or Uniform Resource Identifiers, are an integral part of the web. They reduce chaos by introducing elegant complexity. Instead of having to navigate to http://www.themolotov.net everytime, you can navigate directly to http://www.themolotov.net/search/AJAX if you want, and it'll pull up the search results for entries tagged with 'AJAX'. URIs identify things on the web. Sounds intuitive doesn't it?

What is counter-intuitive is the practice of destroying the usability of URIs with AJAX. Sure AJAX can provide some great, convenient functionality to a page, but it can be abused also. I stumbled upon a site today that was 'AJAX-ified' into oblivion. The design was mediocre, at best, and the content was lacking. Yet, the entire thing was a single page using who-knows-how-many javascript calls to refresh the page. I must have navigated 25 pages while on the root URI. I couldn't link back to any specific page if my life depended on it. Sheesh, that was annoying.