The web is a fast-moving medium, a new technology can go from being unknown to being a requirement for almost every industry job within mere months. So in a field where it’s so easy to get left behind, how can I justify being hesitant to adopt the new ideas that come along? This article explores some of my reasoning.

These days it seems like just going on a short holiday can be enough to make you miss the boat on a new technology. AJAX (okay, not strictly new but newly popularised) went from a shiny new feature that made things like GMail unique to being a requirement on just about every web-related project or job. It wasn’t that long ago that we were marvelling at GMail’s slick user interface, these days if someone released a webmail app that didn’t use AJAX it would probably be marked as out-of-date. A similar situation is visible with Rails. The Model-View-Controller approach to web development has been around for quite a while, but thanks to frameworks like Rails and Django, everybody is doing it and it’s a boat many would say you can’t afford to miss.

I am slow to adopt new technologies, not because I’m unaware of them but because I haven’t worked on enough projects to integrate them into my work. But even when we get ourselves a new project and are in the planning stages we should still be hesitant to these new ideas My reasoning isn’t that these technologies are bad, they aren’t, but rather that if we don’t play devils advocate to every part of a project we’re setting ourselves up to start doing things just because they’re cool and trendy. People are still struggling to make AJAX accessible so you can probably see some obvious problems if we start using it for every single part of our work. I’ve even seen people making promises to include more AJAX in their projects, I struggle to see how a promise like that can be beneficial.

Imagine that you’re an architect and the lift (elevator for Americans) has just been invented (lets ignore any timeline-related flaws in this analogy). These things are pretty cool, they let people stand in one place and go up and down a building. They don’t take as much space as stairs and are usually faster too. Why don’t we just get rid of stairs then, take out a stairwell and we can probably add in another 4 lifts. Wow! This new invention is fantastic we should use it for everything, even houses with only 2 floors. Hey! The lights just went out…?

Lifts are a good invention, but sometimes a lift isn’t necessary and you should definitely always keep the stairs.

The skeptical approach I take allows me to keep myself informed about ideas but also remain cautious about them. I still get to use the nice AJAX-type technologies when it’s suitable, but I avoid falling into the trap of using them just because I can. Hopefully this means I make better better decisions and end up producing more robust and usable products.