[strken]

Are walled gardens and app churn really the fault of AJAX requests, though?

For that matter, would removing AJAX and modern JS have fixed anything, or would people have routed around the problem? Any alternate web I can imagine just ends up with everyone using Flash/Shockwave/Silverlight/Java applets, which are even worse. A handful of diehards stay on plain HTML, just like they do today, while everyone else moves to gigantic ad-ridden behemoths.

[elephant_talk]

Walled gardens aren’t the result of Ajax, no. They’re the result of insufficient or missing standards (or at least lack of standards enforcement).

How many times do you encounter a website that doesn’t support your OAuth provider of choice? So you keep 2 or 3 around, and oh this site only does their own password based auth, OK I’ll use my password manager to make a one-off for this site.

Keep in mind, JS itself was developed by one browser vendor (Netscape IIRC) because there was a lack of a standard for interactivity on the web. These tools arise out of need, but because of capitalism the players creating the tools don’t work together. They stand to benefit if they can “win” and starve the others until the other solutions die, so that’s what they hope to do. It’s anti-consumer.

I don’t know what the answer is. Maybe it should be illegal for apps not to allow certain levels of interoperability and freedom to migrate. Hence a previous poster’s term, “GDPR-sized hammer”.