Get over it, people! Ajax is not an acronym! Ajax does not stand for "Asynchronous JavaScript And XML!" Somebody made that up, based on a presumption, and somehow it stuck. Kind of like the name Ajax, itself.

Why "Ajax"? WHO KNOWS? It's just some buzz word some guy conjured up while taking a shower. The best way to give old technology new life, I guess, is to give it a name. Hence, Ajax was born.

Ajax is nothing new. It has been around for a while. At least the core enabling technology has. Someone just thought they could take this one little asynchronous function (XMLHttpRequest) and do wild and crazy things with it. It kind of reminds me how someone must have looked at the web browser - which was originally designed for the sole purpose of displaying static content reasonably consistently across operating systems - and said, "I want to interact with that - make it dynamic."

God, it's amazing this crap has come this far and survived this long. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and now - holy shit - Ajax! Oh, wait...all that other crap IS Ajax. Well, but now that we have Ajax, we can do SO MUCH MORE WITH THIS ILL-EQUIPPED BROWSER which is based on technology that never should have survived.

Do yourself (and the rest of the world) a favor - install the latest Flash Player, download Flex (and buy the Flex Builder if you can afford it), and start using something that makes sense. Flash Player is Flash Player, regardless of where it is installed. If you create content for Flash Player, it will (or should!) run wherever Flash Player is installed - even in a crappy old web browser from last century.

I am SO SICK of the direction all this Web based crap has gone, and I am SO SICK of people harping on the open-source and "standards" issues until they're blue in the face. Let's stop cutting corners and start using shit that works and makes sense!!!

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