[krapp]

You make it seem as though AJAX is some unstable, bleeding edge experimental feature that no one ever uses. There's no danger of sacrificing backwards compatibility, or of browsers no longer supporting AJAX in the future.

However, Hacker News does use AJAX, and I don't think it even uses whatever img tag trick OP is referring to. The only img tags on the page are the icon and the vote arrows. If it's there, I couldn't find it.

But read the javascript yourself - AJAX support is just a single, simple function. No unit tests and QA team, no depending on some flaky maintainer. Maybe they do unit tests, I don't know, this place is kind of a black box sometimes.

[theandrewbailey]

I think he's annoyed that lots of people are trying to re-implement the wheel using a poor AJAX based solution when an older solution is better, but no one likes using anything "old".

[krapp]

AJAX is not really a new thing, though. It's probably older than some of the developers who complain about it.

[waitButWhy]

It's still implemented differently across different browsers, past and present, and despite being mature it isn't exactly future proof.

[krapp]

Cross-browser AJAX is= a solved problem at this point. You can just go to Stack Overflow or find one of countless libraries to handle it to whatever degree of compatibility you want.

And all code is a moving target - nothing is future proof, especially where javascript is involved, but AJAX seems a lot more future proof than hacking image tags to do something other than loading images. It's baked into front-end templates and the caching strategies of the biggest sites on the web so it's not likely to go anywhere anytime soon.