I noticed today that Gmail is now offering an alternative, non-AJAX interface, selectable by choosing “basic HTML” below the message listing. This is actually a great opportunity to experiment and see whether AJAX (or any other kind of heavy DHTML-style interaction) actually makes a enough of a difference to justify the extra implementation work.
I’ll do all my Gmail browsing using old-style HTML forms until next week and observe how much I miss the extra features, then will report back here.
(First note: Gmail does not allow you to change account settings using the non-AJAX interface.)
Quoderat 
Do you currently use keyboard shortcuts with the AJAX interface? Does the non-AJAX UI allow you to use the keyboard shortcuts? I know some people live and die by that feature alone.
The “basic HTML” does not allow for keyboard shortcuts. But it does allow for Opera 7, whereas the full feature-set requires Opera 8, which is still in beta.
If you haven’t you should read Mark Birbeck in the same vein..
XForms Patterns: Dynamic URLs and Google Maps
XForms Patterns: Incremental and ‘Google Suggest’
After RSS readers, Google Suggest and now Google Maps, maybe next week Mark will give us Gmail…
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