Even if it's not always the best markup, what are Facebook and Twitter? They're web standards with some scripts. They may not validate, but they're still CSS layouts and simple markup, and that's great!
At Adaptive Path, we've been doing our own work with Ajax over the last several months, and we're realizing we've only scratched the surface of the rich interaction and responsiveness that Ajax applications can provide.
Google is making a huge investment in developing the Ajax approach.
We found a way to make things look great to the human eye through the window of a graphical web browser without worrying about what everything looked like under the hood.
Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.
Because the competitive landscape of the web is such that the site which looks and works best gets the most traffic, developers and designers put a premium on the presentation of that content and let structural markup take a back seat.
Ajax is an important development for Web applications, and its importance is only going to grow.
Real web designers write code. Always have, always will.
Writing old school HTML code was never very much fun but now it's getting downright tedious for most people.
