31st
January
2007
Technology- Adam Bosworth on early days of DHTML
posted in Technology |Adam Bosworth gave a talk this week that was picked up in some of the press including this write-up at eWeek and again at Slashdot. He talks about the early days of DHTML and Ajax and some of the Slashdot comments have picked up on his talking about having invented Ajax and
suggested this conflicts with my Story of XMLHTTP write up that has been carried in many online outlets lately.
suggested this conflicts with my Story of XMLHTTP write up that has been carried in many online outlets lately.
I’ll weigh in and say that both are true. To the extent that there is some confusion its because what we call AJAX today is a collection of many things- The basic dynamic
HTML infrastructure. The XMLHTTP & async network communication piece. And the patterns of tying it all together.
HTML infrastructure. The XMLHTTP & async network communication piece. And the patterns of tying it all together.
Adam and his team (especially folks like Rod Chavez, Michael Wallent and many others, as usual I’m probably forgetting to mention some of the key people) invented
the Dynamic HTML part which was miles beyond what Netscape was doing at the time. I just filled in the XMLHTTP piece, and collaborated with many others to do the first major app that tied it together (Outlook Web Access). Without the earlier contributions of the Trident/IE teams, it wouldn’t have been possible, and its absolutely true that Adam and many folks he worked with had the conceptual vision for tying it together (he called it weblications at the time).
the Dynamic HTML part which was miles beyond what Netscape was doing at the time. I just filled in the XMLHTTP piece, and collaborated with many others to do the first major app that tied it together (Outlook Web Access). Without the earlier contributions of the Trident/IE teams, it wouldn’t have been possible, and its absolutely true that Adam and many folks he worked with had the conceptual vision for tying it together (he called it weblications at the time).
Having said that, they never built a real app with it and the act of using it for real turned up some missing pieces, leading to XMLHTTP as well as several other things that the Trident and XML teams themselves pioneered. I’d also like to acknowledge the Adaptive Path guys for coming up with a nice description of the approach and giving it a word that wraps it up nicely (Ajax). At Microsoft we totally blew the opportunity to evangelize and get out in front of this approach back in 1999. That itself is a longer story for sometime in the future. I realize that some in the technical community are “all about the engineering” but effective marketing and
communication of your ideas is important and we missed out on that.
communication of your ideas is important and we missed out on that.
I do also think that Adam’s discussion of why Ajax didn’t take off in 1997 misses a key point. Sure, network connections were too slow at the time. The computers themselves and Javascript was too slow (recall that typical machines were 200mhz). The earliest versions of DHTML in IE4 had some.. er.. issues to work out (there was more than one reason that OWA required later versions of the browser). But most importantly I just don’t think its realistic to expect the development community to make sweeping shifts to some new technology quickly. As I’ve mentioned before these things take 3-5 years, so its not much of a surprise that the stuff that was developed incrementally between 1996 and 1998 actually started to hit it big in 2000-2002 and really exploded in 2005-2006.