AJAX Talk: Anyone Remember expando properties?

Continuining with the look at how AJAX is “changing” the way web apps are being assembled, I thought it interesting to point out something that was once a problem in IE.

For years, IE supported “expando properties” which were essentially attributes that could be added to any element in the document. Personally, I used them all the time as they enabled really delicate interactions without the need for huge arrays of data in JS. Of course, later these were shunned by many because they resulted in your document not validating.

Recently, with the rise of AJAX techniques, I see there are many people adding properties onto their objects. In some cases, they are added as attributes. In other cases, I am seeing clever use of class names to convey some of that information (though that seems like a technique that won’t scale all that well).

I came across this link for a task list from the Ajaxian blog. It’s a really nice use of this technology. It also uses attribute stuffing.

Where do you all stand on this?