Is it AJAX, Ajax...or XForms?

There seems to be growing agreement that what some have been calling AJAX should now be called Ajax. I'm interested in this because I've long seen Ajax as an approach rather than a specific set of technologies, and in particular, that the mind-set Ajax encourages is very much in tune with that for XForms. Since the techniques used in Ajax are in many cases a subset of the rich features available in XForms--with often the difference being that XForms takes a declarative approach whilst Ajax uses procedural scripting--I see Ajax as an incredibly important stepping-stone (or even advert) for XForms.

The Ajax upper case/lower case debate has been an interesting one, but it's great to see how quickly people have realised that they are no longer dealing with an acronym (and therefore a fixed set of technologies) but an approach (and therefore many related technologies). If Pluto can be redefined after thousands of years, 'Ajax' can certainly be redefined after only two!

But I feel confident in predicting that the next phase for Ajax (rather than AJAX) will be less about improvements in its functionality, and more about making it easier to use (there are, after all, only so many animation or drag-and-drop routines you can write). And to make it easier to use, Ajax needs a declarative language. Since XForms was designed from the ground up to solve exactly the problems that Ajax does, it fits the bill, and I see the 'renaming' of Ajax as an incredibly important step towards encouraging people to see where XForms fits in the Ajax spectrum.

I suppose I should be a little more precise, and say that actually the language we need is XForms plus XHTML (perhaps with SVG, MathML and various other standard mark-up languages thrown in). For ease, I've called the aggregate language xH, and the key idea is that mark-up can be used to build web applications. XForms provides an incredibly powerful piece of this.