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Revision as of 21:50, 13 August 2005 by 24.53.131.244 (talk) (→Criticism)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Jesse James Garrett is an information architect and founder of Adaptive Path, an information architecture and user experience firm. Garrett also co-founded the Information Architecture Institute, and his essays have appeared in New Architect, Boxes and Arrows, and Digital Web Magazine.
Garrett authored The Elements of User Experience, a conceptual model of user-centered design first published as a diagram in 2000 and later as a book (ISBN 0-7357-1202-6) in 2002. Although originally intended for use in web design, the Elements model has since been adopted in other fields such as software development and industrial design. He also created the first standardized notation for information architecture, known as the Visual Vocabulary.
Garrett's other works include ia/recon, an influential essay on the evolution of the information architecture field, and The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams, a conceptual model similar to Elements for team structures and processes. In 2005 Garrett coined the term AJAX to describe a class of dynamic web applications which had been technologically possible since 1998, but hadn't had a standardized name.
==Criticism== Jesse James Garrett has come under fire for taking credit for finding "a new class of dynamic web applications" that had existed. The criticism stems from the existence of these technologies in Microsoft Internet Explorer since 1998 as IXmlHttpRequest and supported with IXMLDOMDocument/DOMDocument. The technologies that Jesse considered to be "new" were actually implemented in various other forms (such as JSON and REST) before Mr. Garrett surfaced with his own term for the application type. Garrett's most outspoken critics often remind neophytes to the computer industry that these technologies existed and already had many names long before Garrett "coined" the term Ajax.
- "this "AJAX" buzzword makes me want to puke"
- "some hotshot comes along, slaps a four-letter moniker on it and bam!"
- "wrapped it up in a cute little acronym."
- "This article isn't all about anger over this marketing BS — although it is admittedly part of it."
- "So I have a request: could people please stop making up new names for existing technologies? Just call things by their real name! If the real name is too long (the name Ajax was apparently coined because "HTTP+XML+HTML+XMLHttpRequest+JavaScript+CSS" was too long) then just mention the important bits."
- "So the market is there, now someone needs to bring this technology to the market. Mr. Garrett and his friends are doing just this."
- "Building Richly Interactive Web Apps with Ajax"