Jesse James Garrett

It’s easy to forget how different the web was 20 years ago.

Web pages were static things, rendered once and forever. Nothing moved or changed on the web, unless it was an animated GIF. Nothing was dynamic, nothing was real-time, nothing was live, except whatever was supported by this optional extension or that. JavaScript was universally considered a “toy language” suitable only for creating frivolous annoyances for web travelers. Many people advocated for users to disable JavaScript completely in their browsers, considering it more of a hazard than a boon.

You literally could not find a job as a JavaScript developer. There was no market.

All of that changed this week in 2005, when I took a concept I had developed for a client project, encapsulated the core ideas, and gave it a name in hopes that it would make the concept more tangible. I wrote an essay called “Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications”, and, well, everybody promptly freaked the hell out.

I did a million interviews. Everybody was baffled when I wanted to talk more about the design opportunities of the dynamic web than the technical and market valuation implications. There were suddenly Ajax books, Ajax certificates, Ajax conferences, Ajax magazines. By the end of the year both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had referenced Ajax in their keynotes.

But Ajax was different from the typical tech hype cycle, which starts with promises and usually ends in disappointment. The technology was already in place—it just took people seeing it a different way for it to take hold. That, as I see it, is what my work did.

20 years later, the web without Ajax is literally unimaginable. Almost every experience you have on the web would be radically different without it. You could take the old advice to disable JavaScript in your browser, but you’d be cutting yourself off from pretty much every site you’d ever want to use. JavaScript is not only considered a professional-grade language, it’s probably the most widely-used programming language in the world.

We don’t talk much about Ajax anymore. You’ll find it referenced here and there, in comp-sci textbooks and the occasional API call name. What it has become is what I always saw it becoming: simply the web—a richer, more vibrant, more living web than we previously imagined. The technologies, of course, have shifted and matured, but the core pattern I defined remains. Every dynamic refresh, every infinite scroll, every live chat with an agent—Ajax makes all of them possible.

Obviously, a great many people contributed a great many things to get us to where we are now. But I remain proud of the role I played in helping people see where this technology could take us back in 2005, and the many amazing places it has taken us since.