Open Standards and Ajax

Introduction

Ajax is currently one of the major forces in web development. It’s an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It describes a set of technologies that work together with JavaScript to create more dynamic and interactive web applications. It is not a specific product, but its strategy is currently being incorporated in much product development. Through Ajax, web applications behave more like desktop applications, which, in turn, produce a richer for the user. Ajax reduces web page loading time through an improved system of data retrieval and formatting.

It allows for partial data retrieval and validation in real-time so that it isn’t necessary to reload entire web pages every time a user adds information or requests. This increases speed and interactivity. Its incorporation by such colossal search engines as Google have redefined user experience on the Web.

Open standards enable Ajax and, indeed, are integral to its technology. Open standards facilitate communication between hardware and software through a set of standardized specifications that increase interoperation across platforms, programming languages, interfaces, data formats, and communication protocols. They are developed through industry collaboration. They are also platform independent and vendor neutral making them radically democratic. Everyone and anyone can have access to them and they should be included in product development to insure wide product usability.
This article will outline Ajax components and how the development of open standards has contributed to Ajax goals.

Background

Any discussion of open standards as they relate to Ajax must begin with a brief discussion of W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). This organization is the primary organ for web development discussion and industry standards. Tim Berners-Lee founded W3C in 1994 after he invented the World Wide Web in 1989. The general purpose of this organization was to encourage industry consensus around web technologies. The primary goal of the W3C is interoperability. Interoperability is achieved by insuring that web technologies are compatible with each other and that any hardware or software used to access the web work together.

This requires the development of web protocol and programming languages standards that are intelligible across systems and collaborate towards web development and expansion. W3C publishes its standards and guidelines to further a democratic environment for web development. For example, it publishes its open (non-ownership, non-proprietary) standards for web protocols and languages without corporate consideration. No method or product is favored. The primary focus remains interoperability and web improvement.

The term Ajax was coined in 1995 by Jesse James Garrett. It provided a layer of technology between the server and the browser that increased web application responsiveness. This layer of technology is encoded in JavaScript and includes XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). These define the presentation of the interface. XML communicates data interchanges. Asynchronous data retrieval is enabled through XMLHttpRequest objects. This engine communicates with the server through user-input and allows the user to interact with the application independent of communication with the server, asynchronously. This increases usability by not requiring the user to wait while the server communicates with the browser.

For the interoperability required by Ajax, elements of the technology had to be regulated by open standards.

W3C’s Open Standards Develop into Ajax

To understand how W3C has enabled Ajax methods it is important to further trace W3C contributions to web development. It is also important to remember that Ajax components are not new technology, but technologies that have been around since the mid-90s, which coincided with many of W3C’s open standards specifications. For example, in 1996 W3C published CSS Level 1 and in 1998, they published Level 2. These standards were developed for styling web pages. They provide mechanisms for features such as fonts, spacing, picture placement, color and general style elements of web page interfaces.

The publication of HTML 4.0 in 1997 dramatically increased the richness web designers could include in their web page design. HTML 4.0 allowed web programmers to specify style sheets, add tables, and generally make web pages more dynamic. Scripting of the DOM (Direct Object Model) was the mechanism that allowed for this increased accessibility and the addition of features. DOMs are interfaces that are neutral for platforms and programming languages to insure interoperability. These interfaces allow for programs to update and access a web page’s structure, style and content.
In 1998, W3C introduced XML 1.0, which would become the vernacular language of web development and revolutionize interoperability. With the further specification of XML Schema in 2001, W3C provides a standardized protocol for the creation of XML vocabularies. The development of these technologies was integral to Ajax deployment. It was the creative collaboration between them allowed for Ajax to become such a mainstream and accessible methodology. Ajax’s addition of JavaScript, which is a scripting language that can be included in a web page’s HTML, further standardized and facilitated asynchronously communication between browser and server.

Points of Interest

W3C and Ajax’s development and use of open standards has implications for the big technology corporations as they try to stay competitive in web development. The dominance of Ajax use in the major search engine Google means that product development must be compatible with Ajax and open standard technology. Major tech corporations like IBM and Microsoft have been forced to contribute resources to open standards community development so their technologies are not left behind by evolving standards.