Meta-refresh Vs AJAX
I was having a look at a few of the “famous sites” on different current topics like sports, news etc. and I have noticed an annoying thing; many of these sites use meta-refresh tags. For all of you novice to Web development, meta-refresh is a tag that can be used inside the html to automatically reload the page at specified time intervals.
Eg..
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="30">
Now that would automatically reload the web page once every 30 seconds.
Now there is a possible answer. I have seen this kind of reloading mostly on current affairs sites like the news, sports, finance etc. So a decent argument would be to present to the user the most latest and updated content. Now though that seems to be quite true but I would not 100% agree with it. With the latest trends in technology, AJAX and similar technologies are on their pinnacle and they can be used in a state-of-the-art way to achieve the same purpose. AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript Technology And XML) is a way of programming for the Web that gets rid of the lag time that happens in page reloading to update the content on the web page.
In traditional web development, when the user clicks on a link there is request made to the web server. The server now responds and the response is then carried along to the browser and eventually the content is displayed to the user. But all this while the user is waiting for the content. But in AJAX, its all asynchronous. The AJAX engine can hold most information in the engine itself, while allowing the interaction with the application and the customer to happen asynchronously and independently of any interaction with the server. So in this case, when the user clicks on a link, the Javascript loads the content, without reloading the page, as it is aleady being held by the AJAX engine.
So, if the real use of the meta-refresh tag is to present updated content, then I always wonder why wouldn’t one use AJAX? Well, there are a couple of answers I can think of. One could be, “Time constraint to AJAXify a page” which I agree as most of the companies have resource and time constraints. So an easy way for updated content can be a meta-refresh. But the other, in my opinion not so nice answer could be, the Internet ratings. Companies like Nielson, Quantcast, ComScore rate the Websites depending upon their number of Page Visits and Unique Users. So, when the web page reloads once every 30 seconds, each reload is counted as a Page View. Thus the companies end up with high number of page views, hence good rating and obviously more money from the ads.
Now if those could be a couple of the possible reasons for the refresh, if I am on a page that reloads automatically, I would rather not revisit that page. I dont know how many of you guys agree with me, but I, quite frankly get annoyed to see that my firefox crashes cause I left a auto-reloading web page open.
AJAX definitely looks smoother and is a better user experience. In this day and age, there is nothing more annoying then waiting for a page to reload.
Also I agree with the number of page views issues. I believe SMH reloads their page quite regularly and in turn they must be receiving incorrect information as to how many page views they are receiving unless they calculate a new page view is one where there is at least a 20 second gap between each refresh which would actually mean a user went away and came back.. or I suppose a very slow connection… so maybe a larger metric.
But then again you look at the type of people who look at the information.. they are mostly advertisers who are about to pay a lot of money. Would they really understand the reason there are more page views for certain sites?
Maybe it is a clever thing to have! Until you get audited… eventually..
It is really a good article. I can say it is a debate between user experience and marketing strategy :). I am agreeing what ever here says. Always there is a debate about user experience. I have worked on several projects everytime i used to have a debate with marketing persons on user experience issues. Finally VOTE goes towards marketing side :). Technology is improving day by day so marketing strategy. May be in future we will use AJAX also to refresh AD’s :). I think some websites already doing so :).