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The State of Web 2.0, The Future of Web Software 216

Posted by Hemos from the navel-gazing-or-does-it-truly-matter dept.
SphereOfInfluence writes "Despite some disdain for the term Web 2.0, the underlying ideas seem to be genuinely taking off from the seed of successful techniques of the first generation of the Web. Here's an in-depth review of the future of Web 2.0 and online software from Web 2.0 proponent, Dion Hinchcliffe. Like or hate the term, the actual ideas in Web 2.0 are turning out to not only usable but a growing cadre of companies are actively being successful with them. This includes the Ajax phenomenon being actively pursued by Microsoft and Google, widespread social software, and massive online communities like MySpace. These trends are all leading to predictions on the ultimate fallout of these changes, something increasingly called social computing. "
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The State of Web 2.0, The Future of Web Software More

The State of Web 2.0, The Future of Web Software

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  • Why is it called web "2.0" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ylikone ( 589264 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @11:38AM (#15050490) Homepage
    It's just CSS mixed with javascript... is it not?
    • Worse than that. It's a "meme."

      KFG
      • Perhaps the best description of what Web 2.0 is the name Web 2.0 itself. Look at how it goes around, from site to site, blog to blog, gathering new meanings and connotations as it is filtered through hundreds of meaningless tech-blogs. This is perhaps why so few people understand it:

        Q: So what's this Web 2.0 thing, anyway?
        A: What do you mean, "what is it"? It's Web 2.0, that's all it is! Don't you get it? It's brilliant!"

        Kind of like those interesting circular linkages. Link 2.0.

    • The idea isn't just ajax. Its more of an idea of dynamic interactive application like websites, using whatever methods, currently ajax is popular.

      • Re:Why is it called web "2.0" (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @11:59AM (#15050742) Journal
        It's rather ironic that we're trying to get browsers to do what other application platforms have been able to do since the late 1970s. I sometimes wonder if the web browser, like the gopher client before it, should be dropped for something, well, a little less kludgy and arcane.
        • Not nessesarily though I definatly think a new protocol instead of http needs to be looked at. But there is no reason to use another client (besides the obvious need to upgrade said client to support this new protocol). There would be a push to use something similar to x-window protocol, but this is major overkill and would be much harder to secure (serverwise) than what we have now. I guess the crux is, do you want a general computing network application protocol (aka x-win) or individual website that are
          • The general direction that folks want the web to take is very much a distributed computing model. There's nothing wrong with that, and there's nothing wrong with morphing the browser into an application platform. What I have a problem with is stuff like Ajax, which is neither all that revolutionary or all that easy to deal with.

            It looks to my poor old brain more like yet another crusty hack to get current browser technology to do more than it really is all that capable of. And because browsers, unlike

            • X as I said is more for general computing. Possibly a minimalist version of it thats intended to run inside the browser window, as the current technology is way too bandwidth heavy. I guess a little "less" interactivity would help, 1. Let the client( do some of the lifting for simple scripted interactions.
              2. Don't feed every mouse movement to the server unless it is specifically requested.
              3. Don't call the client the server and the server the client, its confusing!
              (yes it made sence in the old unix model wh

        • The irony of X (Score:3, Informative)

          by amightywind ( 691887 )

          It's rather ironic that we're trying to get browsers to do what other application platforms have been able to do since the late 1970s. I sometimes wonder if the web browser, like the gopher client before it, should be dropped for something, well, a little less kludgy and arcane.

          It is also ironic that these days the distributed capability of X Windows (-display host:server:screen) is very portable, efficient, universal, and ignored for a less universal solution, HTTP.

          • Re:The irony of X (Score:2, Insightful)

            by doodlebumm ( 915920 )
            MS Windows doesn't have X already built in, so the functionality using the lowest common denominator was chosen. I am not making a case for the decision, just explaining the reality. I think you are preaching to the choir when I read what you are saying, but there are plenty of others with different opinions. I have said for years that X should have been the standard that MS used for their windowing, but MS didn't own X, so they settled for creating their own, much-less-useable windowing environment (that a

          • Re:The irony of X (Score:3, Informative)

            by jdeluise ( 804732 )
            I'm sorry, but X is neither efficient for the client or the server. The premise behind X is that the application is running on the server (not the X server) and merely displaying on the workstation (the X server). Each instance of said application is going to consume massive resources (on the server..again not the X server), and is ABSOLUTELY NOT SCALABLE! Network-wise this is not ideal either as their is a tremendous amount of inefficient bi-directional communication just to click buttons and type in f

            • HTTP deficiencies (Score:4, Insightful)

              by amightywind ( 691887 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @02:12PM (#15052052) Journal

              Each instance of said application is going to consume massive resources (on the server..again not the X server), and is ABSOLUTELY NOT SCALABLE!

              As opposed to spawning a new process or thread to handle the HTTP connection? There really isn't much difference. Your criticism might be valid if the world still connected to the internet through ppp. It is not. Considering the explosive growth in high speed networking I think the X solution has finally come of age.

              Compare the HTTP architecture with X. You have a few significantly incompatable browsers that are among the most complex programs ever written. There is no steady definition of what these cesspools of code really are. For all that complexity it is remarkable how little they do! HTTP servers are less complex but must be programmed at an absurdly low level. Get into multi-tiered architectures and you have to wonder if people are designing on acid. Page navigation is a huge problem for programs with dynamic content. Those pages are generated inefficiently again and again. Information is typically passed uncompressed across the wire, which is silly.

              X client interfaces (GTK/GDK, Xt/Motif, Qt, ...) are amazingly rich and robust. Your programs work perfectly remotely or locally by definition. As a programmer you never see the X protocol, which is as it should be.

              Network-wise this is not ideal either as their is a tremendous amount of inefficient bi-directional communication just to click buttons and type in fields.

              Bi-directional communication is sort of essential for any network app. Also all significant actions behind those HTTP button clicks are done on the server side to there is no effective difference. HTTP interfaces are very primative of course they are more efficient. Your point is invalid.

              • Re:HTTP deficiencies (Score:3, Insightful)

                by Bogtha ( 906264 )

                As opposed to spawning a new process or thread to handle the HTTP connection? There really isn't much difference.

                Which HTTP servers do that? The most common architecture is to spawn a few child processes on server startup, not to do it for every connection. Don't forget that because HTTP is a stateless protocol, when a connection is closed, the process can just handle another request again straight away. There's a world of difference between X and HTTP.

                Your criticism might be valid if the world

                • Well yes it would be silly if it were true. HTTP has compression and caching built in. You don't seem very familiar with HTTP at all.

                  You argue like a North Korean arms negotiator - vigorously from a position of weakness.

    • Re:Why is it called web "2.0" (Score:5, Interesting)

      by slavemowgli ( 585321 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @11:49AM (#15050618) Homepage
      Pretty much, yes - Javascript, CSS and XML. The funny thing about this is that this is pretty close to what Tim (Berners-Lee, that is) had in mind right from the beginning - that users would actually be able to collaborate on things using the web rather than just getting a bunch of static [1] pages thrown at them.

      1. "static" in the sense of not dynamically interacting with the user in an ongoing communication with the server, that is, not in the sense of "not dynamically generated by the server". Note that a page using "regular" Javascript is still a static page; there might be user interaction, but it's not usually going to communicate with the server, so all interaction is local only (akin to writing into a book you bought, for example).

      • I don't think it really is about any particular technology-- nor should it be.

        Web 2.0, as far as I can tell, is a nexus of collaboration-focused and location-less activities. The concept of storing your personal data (for example, email, photos and documents) "in the sky" rather than on some particular computer that you own and the concept of sharing your data as though it were a document that everyone could edit has been theorized since the early days of "hyper-text".

        Only now is it becoming a reality. Why

      • 1. "static" in the sense of not dynamically interacting with the user in an ongoing communication with the server, that is, not in the sense of "not dynamically generated by the server". Note that a page using "regular" Javascript is still a static page; there might be user interaction, but it's not usually going to communicate with the server, so all interaction is local only (akin to writing into a book you bought, for example).

        The fact that a site might use Javascript and XML at all seems pretty irreleve

    • Not really. Mostly it uses a javascript object to make calls to the server without refreshing the page. Imagine validating entered part numbers in a table on the exiting event of the field. You can them make the field backgrounds turn red on the invalid part numbers (without the full round trip for the whold document).

      There's lots and lots of hype, but underneath there's some really powerful tools.

    • No. It's a pretty vague concept, but basically it's an overall design strategy / feature set rather than a particular implementation detail. Read the article, it explains it in more detail.

      • Re:Why is it called web "2.0" (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ergo98 ( 9391 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @11:54AM (#15050688) Homepage Journal
        Read the article, it explains it in more detail.

        The article is just another guy giving his differing opinion on what "Web 2.0" is. You can find those in the thousands, and there is nothing about this one that makes it more compelling (in fact, and all apologies to Mr. Hinchcliffe, but his take seems even more vacuous and ignorant than most).

        To quote from the article: "Web 2.0 is not a technology, it's a way of architecting software and businesses and companies see the value in the Web 2.0 way of doing business.". What an awesomely vague and useless statement that is. Basically what he's saying is "We'll pick whatever is successful and call it Web 2.0". The mention of MySpace is telling, given that MySpace is nothing more than a continuation of the sorts of social sites that appeared when HTML first hit the mainstream.
    • It's just CSS mixed with javascript... is it not?

      Yeah, basically the same stuff which has been around since like the 90s.
      As more capabile backends and languages (The Java stuff, PHP, .NET, etc...) have popped up, and the feature demand has risen, the real developers of the world have grown less tolerant of the suck-ass presentation environment the HTML jockeys have been swimming around in. They have started to organize things and build the frameworks and ideas.
      But, yeah, it's still the same ole stuff
    • In the same sense that humans are just water contained by some chemicals, sure.
    • It's just CSS mixed with javascript... is it not?

      And five million in VC funds!!11!11eleventeen!!
    • Yeah, and HTML is just an text file.
    • Yeah, and the original boom of the web was just some server side scripting languages and a formatted text file. Big deal?

      You're using a reductionist argument the focuses on the technologies that are used to drive a new breed of web sites, lamely called "Web 2.0" sites. But "Web 2.0" isn't just about technology... it's about the general acceptance of those technologies and the results produced by using those technologies to increase collaboration and knowledge acquisition and sharing. Technology, despite

  • Yeah but, what about the porn? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That's what really drives the web technology!
    • Don't worry, I'm on it.

      Facial expression applet [dyndns.biz] (safe for work) [works in FF1.5 and Opera 9]

      Just a little thing I'm working on, so that we can tag facial expressions too. Look for the girl that's smiling, or the one that's winking/frowning/pouting, whatever.

      Also working on other SVG applets that are even more impressive. Posable 3d mannequins that let you enter in the exact position of the girl in question, so that's searchable too.

      Anyone want a beta account?

    • Not anymore... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Frosty Piss ( 770223 )
      That's what really drives the web technology!

      Old school thinking. That was only really true years ago when "legit" business was still new to the Internet. In my opinion, Porn really hasn't moved that much since the 2000 timeframe. Sure, there are better video codecs, but they are nolonger the product of porn production.

  • Summary of the article summary (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MustardMan ( 52102 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @11:39AM (#15050509)
    I know you guys don't like buzzwords... so here are a bunch of buzzwords.

    • I agree completely (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pHatidic ( 163975 )
      From something I wrote [alexkrupp.com] on this subject:

      The "killer apps" of tomorrow's mobile infocom industry won't be hardware devices or software programs but social practices. --Howard Rheingold

      In his recent essay, Paul Graham pans Web 2.0 because it can't be used to make predictions. Paul is right; the reason is that we have been classing Web 2.0 by its technology instead of its social implications.

      Because, really, who gives a shit about technology? I don't care about technology, I care about me. I don't want to know
      • I want to know how Web 2.0 will get me laid.

        Web 2.0 can get me laid?! That's just what I've been looking for! I bet my wife will be surprised to find this out as well.
    • Thank you for architecting an extreme scalable phased-rollout of that object-oriented, three-tier, web-enabled iPost. (or is it e-post?)

  • More like Web 1.0.2.14 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PFI_Optix ( 936301 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @11:41AM (#15050522) Journal
    This "web 2.0" isn't some massive leap in technology. Nothing really revolutionary has been done to warrant the coining of the term or the implication that it's something new and improved. In the 10 years I've been on the internet, I've watched the slow evolution from barely-useful tool to amazing source of information to social phenomenon. Much of what is being heralded as new and amazing existed in very basic form early on; techniques are simply steadily improving.
    • I disagree (16 years on the internet).
      You had different tools:
      a) usenet: good discussion but no continuity and no usability for non regular users
      b) gopher: lots of good information but difficult to find what you are looking for. Directories helped but were hard to maintain

      web 1.0:
      c) HTML: fixed the graphics problem
      d) Search engines: made it possible to find resources
      e) commerce: long tail economics

      web 2.0
      f) Wikipedia: collaborative information creation
      g) My Space: I don't know. I think collaborati
      • So what you're saying is that "2.0" is an alpha version of a more integrated web?

        Wiki/forums/reviews just remove the need for search engines and usenet to find certain kinds of information.

        Myspace just removes the need for an HTML editor to run your own crappy website.

        In all reality, there aren't any new services being offered in all this, just new tools that make those services somewhat more accessible and centralized. Amazon offers book reviews on their site instead of you having to look elswhere for a re
        • What's new is that before you couldn't easily integrate. Sure, I could use Notepad and knock up a website with some photos on it. Alternatively I could use Flickr, upload them and tag them.

          First way - Search engine may be able to find them. Alteration meant a lot of ballache.

          Second way - I can quickly navigate tags, build sets, and organise.

          To use your example of Amazon, the kind of integration means that not only are reviews in one place, but it's easy to work out if ther reviewer is good (Based on the use
          • There were a lot of steps between the first way and the "second" (2.0) way.

            This isn't a new web. This isn't a revolutionary web. We haven't reached some magical point where it all seems new again. if anything, I'd call this Web 1.5. We're still years away from acheiving the web a lot of us imagined it becoming years ago.
        • Wiki/forums/reviews just remove the need for search engines and usenet to find certain kinds of information.

          No not all. They go much further. They prompt people to unify and create information. I'll do a Wiki page on all sorts of things I wouldn't bother running a website on. More importantly I'll add to other Wikis even more freely. The net result is much more information in my head becomes available for a wide community. Multiply that by tens of millions of people and suddenly you have an order of

        • Wiki/forums/reviews just remove the need for search engines and usenet to find certain kinds of information.

          Wrong. They let me, John Q Whoever, publish information for others to find, and find information others have published. Now, in one sense this was true before, since every jackass could (and did) make a geocities or aol homepage. What I think is the key difference (if there is one) is that in earlier setups, making web content was seen as a separate process from consuming it. It used different too

      • None of your "Web 2.0" stuff is really anything terribly novel. This is the problem with the entire notion, it's nothing more than marketing hype. Yes, Wikis make collaboration easier, but come on, Amazon has merely refined the online store, but those have been around for a decade now.

        Web 2.0 makes it sound like some sort of paradigm shift, when, if such a thing even exists outside the minds of technology editorialists and marketers (who, I have a hunch, are the same damn thing), it's merely just part o

        • Nothing in web 1.0 was terribly novel either. Nothing in usenet was terribly novel (netnews existed on Lan's before). But at each step the effect was huge. Usenet only really was useful when you could usenet talk to people you otherwise couldn't find. HTML only really worked when you could "surf" which meant a critical mass of information, etc... Quantity matters.

          Email couldn't really become a useful tool for general business use until AOL got millions of joe average people on the web. Hell AOL wouldn
    • correct, except for XMLHTTPRequest, which only came around, what, 4 years ago or so?

      that's the main difference between "1.0" and "2.0". the dhtml crap was always there.

    • My favorite quote from TFA:

      "It's this piece that often flips the "bozo bit" of technical people, who often have engineering background that demand explanations in terms of technology and often don't appreciate the social dimension. "

  • Um... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03, 2006 @11:41AM (#15050529)
    MySpace is not 'Web 2.0'. It's 'GeoCities 2.0' if anything.

    • Re:Um... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Disavian ( 611780 )
      On the contrary. GeoCities didn't have a worm, to my knowlege.

      MySpace is sort of a step sideways from GeoCities. Or down. Which of those depends on whether or not you're a teenage girl.

      • Re:Um... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by WilliamSChips ( 793741 )
        For personal MySpaces you're probably correct--it's mostly chain letters. For bands, MySpace is a good idea, even if the implementation is bad. Someone needs to write something like the band-promotion stuff in MySpace without the personal fluff, and make it not suck. (For example, without the millions of pictures people post, you could probably post more than 4 tracks per band)
    • A few sides to web2.0. One is tech (assume that client has Javascript and DOM that is worth a damn). Two is "you have access your information" (supposedly flickr, apis, etc). Three is communal, collaborative activities (ie: Digg, Reddit, dare I say Kuro5hin)... Flickr tags, wikipedia collaborative editing, delicious, etc.

      This is different from:
      • web0.9 (publishers of static sites)
      • web1.0 (dynamic, interactive sites, cms)
      • web1.5 (...all of the 2.0 techs, but in bits and pieces...)
      • web2.0 (the future, in 3-d!)

      S

  • Marketing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Eightyford ( 893696 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @11:43AM (#15050552) Homepage
    The problem with Web 2.0 is that it is nothing more than a marketing term. We've had social networking for decades in the form of Usenet. There hasn't been any major shift in the way we use the internet. At least not one that deserves the 2.0 moniker.
    • A bazillion Usenet newsgroups -> A bazillion web forums
      IRC -> AIM/MSN/ICQ/Y!M/GTalk
      Geocities/generic free homepage site -> Myspace/generice free blog site

      Yeah...nothing about any of this 2.0 stuff is really all the new and different. I think it's really just a new generation of internet users--the first generation to never really know life without it--trying to claim that "their" internet is completely different and better than anything that came before it.

    • The only thing I dislike more than the term "Web 2.0" are the people who blindly knee-jerk against anything mentioning it. Whether you agree or disagree with the term or how it is used, there are significant trends emerging lately that are worth paying attention to. If you write it off as a reinvention of Usenet, you aren't paying attention. "Social networking" isn't about people talking on the Internet, it's about applications that include information sharing as a tool, not as a goal in itself.

    • The problem with Web 2.0 is that it is nothing more than a marketing term.

      It's a label that describes a new way of thinking about product development on the web. Sure, people had similar ideas before, but now they're more pervasive (more heads means more ideas, good and bad). Sure, you could accomplish the same effects before XmlHttpRequest using various methods, but now you get an XML parser and some of the I/O housekeeping done for you. Sure, marketing people coined the phrase, but the product that th

  • Warning: (Score:2, Funny)

    by novus ordo ( 843883 )
    The Bozo bit has been flipped!
  • This includes the Ajax phenomenon being actively purused by Microsoft and Google.

    They mean pursued (I'm assuming), not perused.

    This is a pretty long article, so I'll sum it up for you guys by taking the important passages:

    Key Aspects of Web 2.0

    - The Web and all its connected devices as one global platform of reusable services and data
    - Data consumption and remixing from all sources, particularly user generated data
    - Continuous and seamless update of software and data, often very rapidly
    - Rich and

    • Accept no substitutes!

      global platform
      democratized
      decentralized
      commoditizing
      control structures
      power
      socialize
      engage
      interchange

      The first thing you should learn is that when someone is using buzzwords, they're attempting to sell you on something, not inform you. Selling appeals to emotions.

  • Web 2.0? No thanks. (Score:5, Funny)

    by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @11:47AM (#15050590)
    If there's one thing I can't stand, it's forced upgrades. I'll stick with my Web 1.1.19 (experimental), thank you very much.

  • When will this hit e-commerce? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PacoHernandez ( 939349 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @11:48AM (#15050600)
    It's interesting that the majority of these "Web 2.0" companies are still making their money off of paid advertisements, which seems to be a very "old web" business model. Are there any companies that are doing new and interesting things with commerce itself?
  • "Web 2.0" has been around since 1654. It's more popular now than it was then. Tune in next week for the exciting revelation that it isnt popular anymore.

    In all seriousness, though: increased use of virtual machines and security and such will make "lolit'slikeanapplicationbutinawebbrowserzomg" unneccessary. The idea that it is popular for security reasons is actually, from a security standpoint, sickening. That's just a great way to look at how sorry the state of every other part of the security world is.
  • Much of the interactivity and cross platform capability we're being promised with AJAX sounds suspiciously like the buzz surrounding Java applets 10 years or so ago. However, AJAX is currently in a pretty primitive state. You still have to worry about browser compatibility issues. Tools and libraries are pretty simplistic. You also face the fun issue of dealing with yet another programming language, in addition to whatever HTML, SQL, and XML you're using, plus your server-side language of choice.

    Given all o
  • Web 2.0? Hardly.

    How about Web 1.21 beta?

    Or even better, how about just understanding that the changes in the way the Web is used are incremental and calling it "Web 2.0" in 2006 is just as silly as calling it "Web.com" in 1999 would have been.

    Regardless of what it's called, the intent is to make sure people are aware that the Web offers experiences different from what it offered to the mainstream even three years ago. Because we all need to feel good about the newfangled Web we're using, right? We

  • StumbleUpon (Score:5, Informative)

    by gihan_ripper ( 785510 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @11:58AM (#15050731) Homepage

    One of my favourite innovations in recent years has been StumbleUpon [stumbleupon.com]. It's a very simple idea — you install a StumbleUpon Firefox toolbar and click the "Thumbs Up" button when you come across sites you like, or the "Thumbs Down" button for sites you don't like. This way, StumbleUpon builds up a profile of the sorts of web surfer you are, and will then offer up a suggested website when you hit the "Stumble" button.

    Using StumbleUpon, I've been presented with many really cool websites I woudn't have been able to find using Google, because I wouldn't have known to search for them. It seems my own interests are interactive flash websites, mathematics news, food, and philosophy. You mileage will vary, but will be catered for none the less.

    • And let me guess, it also just happens to send that info on to marketing companies.
    • WOW! Yesterdays Tivo technology, here today. WOOT!
    • Does it just note what categories you're interested in, or does it actually compare your ratings with other people and figure out that you tend to rate things similarly to UserX and might like other things that s/he does? The second should be far more powerful, but I haven't quite figured out the data structures it would take to do it efficiently on a large scale.

      Yes, TiVo can figure out that I'm interested in science, history, cooking and comedy, but I could've told it that directly.

      • Re:StumbleUpon (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jbolden ( 176878 )
        1) Assume 10m users
        2) Assume 200 site ratings each (so 2b total ratings)
        3) build an IOT (call it X) on site:rating:user index this table on user
        4) when I log in pull up all the 200 blocks I'm in (basically a list of other users with the same sites). This is easy because of the user index
        5) do a frequency count for username
        6) Using the index on I pull up sites they like

        I can make this better if I like by having a user/frequence count table and for example adjusting 5 (so that heavy raters don't end up

  • Web 2.0 (Score:3, Funny)

    by mattwarden ( 699984 ) on Monday April 03, 2006 @12:01PM (#15050754)
    Since people were looking for a name which reflected the parallel with 'AJAX', they were forced to select another name which made you want to stab yourself.
    • Since people were looking for a name which reflected the parallel with 'AJAX', they were forced to select another name which made you want to stab yourself.

      I have no mod points here, but kudos on the Illiad reference.
  • ... mobile phones. It's rather accepted that JApan in some respects is ahead of us as far as technical innovation and acceptance of tech. For the Asian countries - phones and functional mobiles are sprinting out ahead. A couple of Japanese contractors I recently worked with, in my age range, were rather disdainful of terminals and preferred to do a lot of things on handhelds. One was actually surprised that I was always notebook equipped. There are logistic issues involved - namely, the Japanese are a small
  • For all the talk of CSS and XHTML making content more accessible, I find it funny that color-blind people are brushed under the rug with all the low-contrast designs most of these Web 2.0 sites are sporting.

    • One of the points of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is that the author's styles cascade with the user's styles. If you've got problems with a colour scheme, set up your browser to use a different colour scheme. Some browsers make this easier than others, but a rule like * { background: white !important; color: black !important; } fixes a lot of contrast problems.

      But ignore anybody who says that XHTML makes things more accessible, they don't know what they are talking about.

  • It doesn't matter that terminal apps have been doing it for 30 years. It doesn't matter that web apps are kludgy because http is stateless. It doesn't matter that you have to keep a lot of data server side. Joe Average User likes the Web and doesn't disable JavaScript, so he's going to respond favorably to anything that improves the interface. If you can present him with what seems like a more responsive application, he's going to be happy. It doesn't matter that you could build an executable that he could
  • From articles I read 3 or 4 years ago, I was under the impression that Web 2.0 technologies were mostly focused on adding semantic data to the web. Web 2.0 was supposed to enable increased machine interface to the web. It seems that this keyword has been reassigned to simply encompass any recent web technologies as the semantic information trend hasn't really yielded any big results yet (I think we can all agree that rss and such are having less impact on users than AJAX interfaces that everyone and their
  • Web 2.0 is the word you are going to hear in the staff meeting of IT department for years to come. Just call it what it is, a buzz word and nothing else. I can hear every CIO telling their drones "We need to build a site in this new age of 'Web 2.0' and proactively create synergy between our e-business and client".
    Granted, there are a lot of new development and trends going on, and things from ajax to user created contents are really going to change the way we view the web, that does not make the web to

  • Replace MySpace!! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by crhylove ( 205956 ) <rhy@leperkhanz.com> on Monday April 03, 2006 @12:52PM (#15051279) Homepage Journal
    We really need an "open source" replacement for MySpace. It's dangerous to allow a private corporation to run a network that is gaining so much importance, particularly among the youth.

    What would be IDEAL, however would be a fully interactive metaverse, ala quake 2 with real time voice for people within 50 "yards" of each other. And virtual houses that could still house the virtual MySpace replacement on one wall.

    I've got $50 for anyone with a working prototype..... ...I'm recommending we treat it like a p2p app so it scales well, also. Say every computer on the node houses 100 of the nearest houses and avatars and MySpace walls of the other 99 users in that "node".... Then whethter the other 99 people are on or not, other people can still visit any house (or myspace wall) in that node, so long as at least one member of the node is online. Maybe 100 is too high a number, but given what the average pc is capable of these days, I doubt it.

    Let me know when you've got it up and running....

    rhY
  • I must be thick (come guys, tell me), but this article strikes me as falling into the "meaningless bubble diagrams connecting unconnectable things" category. I did like the graphs at the end that give you some numbers on ajax traffic.

    But all that other crap? Like (and I quote):

    Key Aspects of Web 2.0:
    - The Web and all its connected devices as one global platform of reusable services and data
    - Data consumption and remixing from all sources, particularly user generated data
    - Continuous and seamless update of software and data, often very rapidly
    - Rich and interactive user interfaces
    - Architecture of participation that encourages user contribution

    Good God where does this dross emanate from? These are the engineering principles that bind together Web 2.0 concepts? It's notable that these attributes can also describe a client/server or 3-tier application, if you hold head just right. They could also describe how my grandmother's recipee book worked. Very interactive... encouraged user participation and contribution (that's what the pencil dangling from it was for).

    If you're the hard-core engineering type, spare yourself a disorienting tour of pseduo-engineering psycho-babble and skip to the graphs at the end.

    Was I too harsh?

  • Bah! Web 2.0 is so outmoded.

    If you're not running Web 2.1, you might as well go back to the bad old days when people actually used client software for email and instant messaging. 2.1 is the only way of doing stuff online.

    You can get a demo of what's on offer here: http://cheese.blartwendo.com/web21-demo.html [blartwendo.com]

    Meanwhile, supporters will be pleased to hear about the imminent release of the long awaited Web 2.1 offshoot, Azotaemia 2.1.
  • Web 2.0? As Microsoft is involved everyone knows it won't be usable until Web 3.1 is released... although it will be named Web 2010.

    Personally I'm sticking with eXtreme Web.
  • I have been investigating some of these tool sets and so far I would say morfik has
    everyone stomped by a long shot.
    The still however have large strikes against them.
    Their visual development environment only runs on windows...strike one. The platform
    thus far is closed source...strike two. On a plus note the compiled applications run
    cross platform. On another plus note you can deploy locally disconnected as well
    as connected. It supports 4 major languages as well which is another plus.

    No I do not have any inte
  • This is all semantic diversion, to put it politely. Some proponents of Web 2.0 are apparently hoping that by changing the definition of Web 2.0. they can make it look like Web 2.0 has actually proceeded in a meaningful direction. Web 2.0 has absolutely nothing to do with AJAX (AJAZ is just a fancy name for doing more on the client side with JavaScript and CSS, which is why they call it AJAX, because if they said 'client-side user interface development in JavaScript across an asynchronous network connectio

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