Earlier today, while perusing the meme sites to see where the groupthink arrow is pointed today, I came across links to the following highly-ranked (at least by anonymous numerics) page.
http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/ahah
I checked the calendar to see if it was April 1st, but alas it does not appear to be. This actually appears to be serious.
This is where the AJAX-trend has brought us - people who have contributed nothing to the global knowledge pool are rushing to remora off of the creations of others and claim it as their own. Every obvious potential use for a programmatic element can become a cheap acronym that someone can append their name to, desperately hoping that they earn some fame for their heroic act of sitting on the sidelines and naming things years after they've entered common use. The fact that the linked page uses the term "discovered" to describe the "discovery" of the most obvious and prevalent use of the XMLHTTPRequest (and friends) object is mind-boggling.
Language like <i>"...had independently discovered the exact same concept..."</i> and <i>"...encountered the work done by..."</i> is a great disguise for the more accurate "is such an obvious technique that even beginners in the field spot it straight away".
I also liked all the stuff about <i>"has no doubt been independently discovered by others... promote it as a formal technique".</i> I suppose all the times I've used this technique since the year 2000 count as discovery, but I feel so foolish for failing to recognise its formality.
Well, I've just noticed that it's possible to use my computer's ALU to perform addition; others may have discovered that independently, but I'm going to "be the first to make a sustained attempt to promote it as a formal technique." :-)
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Dennis Forbes is a Toronto-based software architect. While focused primarily on the .NET and SQL Server worlds, Dennis frequently ventures outside of this comfort zone into game development and image processing. He has been published in several industry magazines, has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and has been interviewed by NPR.He is a vice president and lead software architect at an innovative New York City hedge fund back-office services firm.
Dennis has been working on solutions for the financial, telecommunications, and power generation markets for over 15 years.