Ajax was a mythical Greek hero who faught against Troy. Ajax is also a powder you’d use to clean dishes and sinks. And today it is the name of a group of technologies which together create an utterly different experience for users of the world wide web.<\/p>\n
Ajax was a mythical Greek hero who faught against Troy. Ajax is also a powder you’d use to clean dishes and sinks. And today it is the name of a group of technologies which together…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-labour-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI could tell you what Ajax stands for (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) but — there we go, we’ve lost all those who hate technical jargon.
\nIn plain English, Ajax is a way to bring desktop-type applications to the web. And that’s probably not clear enough either. You really have to experience it to see what I mean.
\nI’ll give you a concrete example of how this new technology is already being used by trade unionists.
\nVisit Backpack, located at http:\/\/www.backpackit.com<\/a>. I use Backpack together with others to maintain common web pages including to-do lists, notes, and more complex documents. It’s a powerful tool for collaborative authoring, whether of a website or a conventional document. And the basic version is absolutely free of charge.
\nAnother really well-known showcase for what Ajax can do is Google Earth. I’d tell you the web address for that (http:\/\/earth.google.com\/<\/a>) but if I did, you’d probably wind up wasting a lot of time as you play with this addictive — and free — online tool.
\nThis is all light years ahead of what unions are doing these days on the web. The very best union websites are still barely interactive — the interactivity consisting mainly of being able to send in a form (like joining) and maybe submitting a comment to an online blog or discussion forum. Ajax promises a much higher level of interactivity, and a richer experience for users.
\nIn another five years, all our sites will work a bit like the way Backpack works now, using Ajax or something like it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"