OverAjaxing
I'm intrigued by Jason Kottke's latest experiments with his weblog homepage. Part of it I really like - the way he's using it to organise the different areas of his site really interests me. Part of it I'm completely indifferent about - pulling in content from other sites seems kind of pointless but harmless. And part of it strikes me as being a bit dumb - which is the whole Ajax thing.
I've been thinking about this, and I can't see any reason why you'd want to use Ajax for this particular functionality instead of just having the whole page reload. You'd be sending a small amount of extra html over the wire, but in return you get bookmark-and-linkability and browser history for free, and you don't have to worry about error handling and edge cases (for example, load the page, disconnect from the net, then try to use the dropdown - nothing happens and you don't get any error messages). Oh, and it would be easy to make it work without javascript, if you wanted to.
I'm glad Jason is experimenting, but can't help but feel I'm missing something here.