led mike wrote:
abusing async requests where the use model does not fit
I was thinking more Microsoft's AJAX dummy tools, rather than Async JS/XML proper. A solid system should be able to do stuff for which it was never intended and keep kicking; you should be able to hand it to an ambitious little code monkey and get back a working system, not a pile of monkey crap. After all, it's been done in Windows for years :~. What concerns me is that if you throw a bunch of (Microsoft's) AJAX controls on a page, those being as close as we'll get for a long time to a unified standard, after a certain critical mass the chance of some major error occurring increases; throw in third party controls and you've really got a mess. On the other hand, if you add an extra button to a crowded Windows form, your concerns are primarily stylistic. The whole system is so damned incestuous - putting everything on a single page, whether you use Iframes and their various relatives as separating mechanisms or not, is like writing an entire Windows form's functionality inside the form - it works for simple stuff, but if you try anything interesting, you really have to cover your, um, source code. Blockquotes work alright, but again, why jam a bunch of functionality into form_load? Split it into separate pages and think of them as classes with built-in return functionality. Or don't. As for DHTML, I've worked with it. Do you really want to go back to that? As for setting me off, just about anything code-related does it. I did just spend five hours on a Greyhound bus in driving snow, if that's an excuse. Two months and my commuting days are over... Oh, and you know something else? Web parts... but that definitely belongs in the rants section.
