Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!

Marcia. She was the perfect little girl that everyone talked about, much to the detriment of the whiny, middle child syndrome addled Jan. In many respects, all of the user interface widgets in the bright and shiny new world of AJAX have a lot in common with Marcia. They are pretty, competent, and eminently datable.

Let’s hear it for the middle child, though. Let’s stick up for Jan. There has to be more to an AJAX enabled existence than a visual effects style approaching Flash. What about logging? What about monitoring? What about self-adaptive interfaces? These capabilities may not be as attractive as widgets but they deserve our attention, and there is a lot that AJAX enables on this front that people do not seem to be delving into very deeply.

So in conclusion to this pint sized rant, although the majority of me is in awe of the toolkit creation and technology adoption that is taking place in the DHTML community, a small part of me is worried that it is too UI centric (with a couple of notable exceptions, such as Ghost Train or the as of yet undocumented profiler and logger in Dojo).

P.S. Dude, Jan got hot.