外文翻译Introducing Ajax.docVIP

外文原文 来源： 《Mastering Ajax》 14 Aug 2007 From OReilly Media Inc. Introducing Ajax The path of history is littered with splits, branches, and what-if’s. The pace of development of technology is relentless and often merciless. Past battles have seen VHS triumph over Betamax, PCs over microcomputers, Internet Explorer (IE) over Netscape Navigator, and plenty more simi- lar conflicts are just waiting to happen in DVD formats. It doesn’t mean that one technology was necessarily better than the other; it’s just that one format or technology had the features and func- tionality required at that time to make it more popular. You’ll still find enthusiasts now waxing lyrical about the benefits of Betamax tape, claiming that it was smaller, had better quality and such. It doesn’t mean they were wrong. Perhaps they were being a little sad and obsessive, but beneath it all, they had a point. The evolution of the Internet has had its own such forks. One that continues to rumble is the so- called “fat-client” versus “thin-client” debate. Briefly put, this is the choice between getting your browser to do most of the work, as opposed to getting a server at the other end to do the process- ing. Initially, in the mid-1990s, it looked as if the “fat-client” ideology was going to win out. The introduction of IE 4 and Netscape Navigator 4 brought with them the advent of Dynamic HTML, which used scripting languages to alter pages so that you could drag and drop items or make menus appear and disappear without requiring a page refresh. Within a year, though, there was a rush toward the “thin-client,” with the introduction of server-side technologies such as Active Server Pages and PHP. The client-side techniques still exist, but the model of current Internet and web page usage is broadly based on the server-side method of “enter your data, send the page to the server, and wait for a response.” When one format predominates in the stampede to adoption, you can often forget what was good