2006-03-21 #2

AJAX the Singing Frog

Over the years, whenever someone shows be something “new & cool” in HTML/CSS/Javascript/AJAX (like menus, tabs, line-drawing, sortable-tables, space-invaders, etc), I get the feeling that what I’m seeing is akin to a singing frog. The impressive thing about a singing frog isn’t necessarily the quality of its singing, but rather, that it can sing at all. We’ve had line-drawing, menus, tables, etc. for decades, so why should they be impressive now? Why have we put ourselves in a position where we have made programming so artificially difficult that we are now impressed by features which were routine twenty years ago?