Thanks Carl, this is a very interesting read.
I think the article demonstrates that, like all technologies, there are always two sides to a single coin. A pro and a con, a good and a bad.
I've always believed that AJAX flourished because browsers supported it.
http://hamisageek.blogspot.com/2006/09/whats-fuss-over-comet.html
We may be at the verge of evolution. Who knows, maybe in a few years there won't be a need to use a back button or the browser's history function will start to track ajax calls.
In the end, I think it will boil down to
- the target market of your web application
- the purpose of your web application.
Who you want to attract and for what purpose. If AJAX can draw attention to your marketing web front, and majority of your users (specially the users that matter to you) are unikely to have javascript off, why not ?
This is not to say that we are free to use Ajax whenever and wherever we like. I believe there should be a conscious effort to design the application to use techniques that are both "unobtrusive" (as in unobtrusive javascript) and provides fallback.
A more concrete example is the blog comment system Solution Grove worked on for PPS.org http://www.pps.org/news/.
With javascript on, you get the nice Ajax where the comment you've just added appears right on that page after you comment. However, if you turn javascript off, you will notice that the comment system will fallback to the old way where the form is submitted to another page that submits the comment.
