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copied!<p>When considering implementing an AJAX pattern on a website you should first ask yourself the question: why? There are several good reasons to implement AJAX but also several bad reasons depending on what you're trying to achieve.</p> <p>For example, if your website is like Facebook, where you want to offer end-users with a rich user interface where you can immediately see responses from friends in chat, notifications when users post something to your wall or tag you in a photo, without having to refresh the entire page, AJAX is GREAT!</p> <p>However, if you are creating a website where the main content area changes for each of the top-level menu items using AJAX, this is a bad idea for several reasons: First, and what I consider to be very important, <strong>SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is NOT optimized</strong>. Search engine crawlers do not follow AJAX requests unless they are loaded via the onclick event of an anchor tag. Ultimately, in this example, you are not getting the value out of the rich experience, and you are losing a lot of potential viewers.</p> <p>Second, <strong>users will have trouble bookmarking pages</strong> unless you implement a smart way to parse URLs to map to AJAX calls.</p> <p>Third, <strong>users will have problems properly navigating using the back and forward buttons</strong> if you have not implemented a custom client-side mechanism to manage history.</p> <p>Lastly, each browser interprets JavaScript differently, and with <strong>the more JavaScript you write, the more potential there is for losing cross browser compatibility</strong> unless you implement a framework that such as jQuery, Dojo, EXT, or MooTools that handles most of that for you.</p>

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