Farewell HTML Ajax
I just realized that I’ve completely stopped using HTML Ajax. The framework has become completely superfluous for me now that I’m using jQuery’s $.post method.
Do I still think that HTML Ajax can be useful for some people? Not really, if you are remotely serious about making your applications richer then do yourself a favor and learn jQuery from the beginning instead.
The reason I started using HTML Ajax was that it allowed me to bypass handling the result of the Ajax call in javascript, something I really appreciated before I discovered jQuery. With HTML Ajax it’s possible to assign the result through it’s action methods in PHP and the javascript will be automatically generated for you, which is nice if you don’t like writing javascript selectors from scratch. Luckily you won’t have to do that if you use jQuery, it can’t be much easier to find your way through the DOM. That is why I’m throwing HTML Ajax out of my toolbox. The problem it solved has been solved in a much more fundamental and elegant way by jQuery.
Now if you still detest writing javascript and can’t see the beauty of jQuery – or if you only need simple selectors – then by all means, use HTML Ajax instead.