What is really wondering me is not the technology behind the name, but is how the name itself (a contraction for Asynchronous data retrieval and JavaScript/Ecmascript) became so popular in a so short time. It was about a month ago that it has been introduced, by a (now famous) J.J. Garret article. In the meantime, looking at this glorious spreading, there has been also someone who did not accepted it as-is, as many did (myself being one of them: I do like the name, and I think that a stack like this should have a name for the love of all the nerds out there).

So, here are the contenders:

  • J. J. Garrett named it. On his blog a lot of people did comply about this (dangerous?) use of a trademarked name of Colgate-Palmolive company. They really did not like to work with a SOAP :)
  • Tantek Celik did not like the term too, and proposed it’s own replacement: CADEX. Pronounced “kay-decks”, and stands for CSS Asynchronous DOM Ecmascript XML/XHTML.
  • Then came Hixie (Ian Hickson), stating that we all should call an apple a apple. He does not like at all not the name, not its meaning, but the fact that now we all call by another name something that did already existed with its own name. (Which name could him have been proposed for TCP/IP? TCP and IP?)

By the way, J. J. Garret is also the inventor of the Visual Vocabulary aka the Garrett Diagrams. They are shipped with Mac OSX OmniGraffle as the Garrett IA shapes.

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