I can't understand all the hype around Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript and XML).

I've done some experiments with it, and there are so many caveats...

Basically, most of the time you are hacking around bugs and missing stuff in browsers. If you look at google maps, this is between 150k-200k in JavaScript source, optimized javascript that is with two-letter function names. For each browser supported, totaling in over 500k. In freaking compressed javascript!

That is not the future. That is stone age!

Now to OpenLaszlo, which was just mentioned on Planet XMLHack.

Don't even bother to look at it. That is even worse! It's using Flash, which is a usability crime. Is there any free parser for flash? Is there any (working with all recent extensions) other application than the flash plugin itself that can playback flash?

Even worse: is there any screenreader that can access flash? A search engine which can get the actual information from flash?

No. Flash is the way to go if you want to make your website really really inaccessible. Don't do it. With recent CSS we have reached a point where you can write XHTML pages that contain the actual information and put all the fancy layout stuff into CSS so screen readers and search engines don't get confused. So that third parties can access your site just fine.

With XSLT and XML this can become even better. That is what the semantic web (or whatever marketing people refer to by "Web 2.0") is about, not some fancy graphics stuff: making information accessible.

And maybe in the far far future, Microsoft Internet Exploiter will maybe be able to support all recent standards correctly. Like CSS. And maybe SVG, so we can get rid of Flash completely.

The second aspect with "Web 2.0" that I'm aware of is Human-Human interaction, btw. This has changed a lot in the past few years, independently of hypes such as Ajax. By reading this, you basically acknowledge this: Blogs have become something quite important in "todays" web. And they are just one part of the puzzle. There are friend-of-a-firend networks, podcasts, and while this is also "fancy new stuff" and might even use Ajax, the point is about information interchange between humans. Write your blog in Flash and it can't be syndicated. Make your blog in ajax and google won't index it except if you write a special "old-style" Google backend, too.

I just released laysvn 0.1 (if you wonder what layered subversion is, visit that page, or read this blog posting of mine).

This "release" can only do a checkout/update for the layered repository. But by running it and then changing to your storage directories (this is where the real subversion checkouts reside) and running commit there you can already commit, too! Jippee!

The empty platform of a train station outside of munich illuminated at night, with the camera placed on the floor for an unusual perspecitve. Another shot between reality and a computer graphics like feeling (have you ever played first person shooters? the texture of the floor looks blurred like in typical computer games at these angles, and the train stations structure is so regular it could have been a computer construct...)

Der leere Bahnsteig einer S-Bahn-Station ausserhlab von München. Eine Insel des Lichts in der Nacht... Die Kamera ist auf den Bahnsteig gestellt, was für eine eigenartige Perspektive sorgt, irgendwo zwischen realität und Computergrafik: Die unschärfe der Boden-Textur im Vordergrund erinnert an Computer-Texturen, und die Träger des Bahnhof-Dachs sind so gleichmäßig konstruiert, dass sie leicht aus "virtueller realität" stammen könnten.

Take me home...