Lots of buzz around “Web 2.0″ these days, here’s my take on it.
What is it?
Basically “Web 2.0″ is the type of website that is the result of using Javascript (ajax), XHTML, CSS, and RSS.
What’s good about it
The great thing about all of the new “Web 2.0″ sites on the internet are that they are very appealing to the eye, more user friendly, and more interactive. This makes the web much more enjoyable to use, and since all of these technologies are standards-based and integrated into the browser, it allows complex websites to be much less intrusive and a hell of a lot faster.
Why did it take so long?
These technologies (with the exception of RSS, although I concider that to be the least important) have been around for a very long time, so why did it take so long for people to start doing more with javascript than make angry buttons and snowflakes fall from the top of the page? There is one single company to blame, and that company is Sun.
Why is this Sun’s fault? Because of Java.
Java over the years has increasingly given it’s self a bad name among users. You can mention “java” to any non-developer (as well as many developers) and they will instantly cringe thinking of all those slow awful games and even slower navigation bars with strange water effects that crashed their browser for so many years. When was the last time you recomended someone try a java application and got a response other than something along the lines of “ugh, I don’t want to install java”.
Seriously, go try it.
Now, what does this have to do with Web 2.0? You might not realize this, but most people (even people that have some web skills) are not aware that Java and Javascript are not the same thing! Java’s bad name has carried over to Javascript, which is why people spent so many year progressing backwards by using proprietary technologies that can be even more unstable and bloated than Java, such as ActiveX and Flash.
And now one final question for Sun: What the hell have you been doing for the past 4 years?! How did you let a bunch of hackers come up with an awesome and completly free cross-platform development environment that many would argue to be FASTER than Java in less than half of the time!? Seriously, I have not been able to figure this out.
Anyway, enough of that.
What’s bad about it?
What sucks about Web 2.0? Its not the technology… it’s people going completly overboard with it.
I saw this article on Digg today: Microsoft building a fully Web-based Office?, and I am sure everyone remembers the media buzz a few weeks ago about some Google+Sun office-reated operation (which has so far been nothing but smoke in the wind).
Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I do not enjoy spending half of my life in my web browser. You will never get the same amount of integration with the operating system, speed, security, and overall flexibility with a web application than you get with a well-written client-side application, even if you use every single effect from the Prototype library (sometimes it feels like we are back to the days of <blink> and <marquee>… are the return of background MIDIs next?).
Trying to do everything in the browser is taking a step backwards. It doesn’t make things more free or open, and it doesn’t really make things more accessable. My cable modem goes down and I can’t edit a document? One of Microsoft’s servers fails and I have to wait 24 hours before I can access a file? Why is it that a few years ago when Microsoft talked about doing something like this (No? “My Services”? “.NET Passport”? “Hailstorm”?!?!) people were extremely vocal in opposition to it, but now that Google has come out and made people think about it, it is suddenly OK? And don’t try to tell me that the ajax applications of the future will be able to save your documents locally, because thats like taking an airhorn and blowing it in an angry giant sleeping rat’s face while screaming BRING IT ON!!! Seporation is here for good reason.
Are people so freaking in love with Firefox that they never want to close it? Perhaps I am too picky, but I like to spend as little time in here as possible.
So… now what?
I hope people keep writing awesome “Web 2.0″ applications, but I also hope to see amazing client-side applications that integrate into them. A GTK frontend to GMail would be awesome because as much I love gmail’s “label” system compared to the standard folder-based way of organizing mail, having to launch my browser to check my mail is annoying.
Please keep my office applications out of my browser. No matter how much ajax you cram into a web page you cannot match a real desktop application, it’s just not possible. Let browser developers keep working on making browsers great for what they were originally designed for - surfing the web, and lets all continue to work on making the internet and the desktop integrate together…without proprietary and unnessisary technologies.
8 Comments
I seriously think that you’re ‘complaining’ about human nature here, Eric.
Any time something new comes along, be it tech related or otherwise. People want to see what it can do. They want to push it to it’s limits. And then eventually it goes to a level to where it’s just used conveniently.
We’ve just got to give it some time.
Though many developers think of Java as a dirty word (myself included), it isn’t what’s been stopping web 2.0.
I think that as far as Javascript and web 2.0, we were really waiting for netscape 4.x to die out along with the earlier versions of IE (IE 5.0, and IE for mac etc) Untill those older techs had died out there was no consistant way to do things (IE for mac is still a nightmare, but fading.)
What brought about the death of these browsers??? Firefox.
Firefox forced the mozilla code base into the present from it’s stalled state. And as much as geeks are lothe to admit it, it also brought up alot of feature pairity with IE. (transparency, css features, etc… they may not be implemented the same, but the features are finally there)
But it also took time after firefox 1.0 was launched. Finally the css geeks and who advocated separation of content and formatting (one of the tennents of strong css design and web 2.0) had a browser that matched their desires, and one they could influence. (The CSS Samurai that later morphed into WASP). Then we needed a tipping point of users who use firefox (rumor has it, it’s ~10% of the web at large though there’s no way to know for sure). Before firefox, there were alot of web apps that acted like web 2.0 applications, but since browser neutrality was very hard, they resided on intranet sites where vendors or IT depts. could control the browser and limit the nightmares of the developers. Now that the web has advanced, these technologies are emerging from their intranet caves like mamals after the comet at the end of the dinosaurs.
The second half of the wait has been time for the meme of web 2.0 to spread to a large enough pool of developers. Looking at sites like alistapart.com we can see how the methodologies and techniques that developers use to develop web 2.0 features has matured- and is continuing to.
Where is the “standard” for the XMLHttpRequest objects?
It’s not AJAX without the XMLHttpRequest, and I sure don’t recall a standard for that.
I’m not so sure that it is because of confusion with sun java that javascript has been standing at the sideline for years. Isn’t it because of microsoft that it became much more difficult to use javascript ? Even if you had your script working on one browser it would not work for the other. A lot of developers just depend on servertechnology because of this problem.
Nice post.
IMHO, one thing I’d add to you definition is the use of a 3rd party API or the provision of an API for 3rd parties to consume. For me at least, it is this distributed dimension that makes something ‘Web 2.0′ or not (am not counting RSS as an API). Therefore, I think what you’re describing is RUA (rich user interface) or AJAX.
Sun is not to blame for it taking so long. Actually, it’s the /. crowd who are to blame. There was a lot of backlash against Microsoft for creating proprietary features in IE such as XmlHttpRequest which meant AJAX stuff just wasn’t viable - a lot of this backlash came from /. And then the Seamonkey team realized it was a good idea which all of a sudden validated some of these gfeatures.
You reason that you would like a GTK front end to GMail because you hate opening a browser to read mail - well I assume you have open a mail client to read email anyway. What’s the difference? Would you mind if Google created a XULRunner application which called itself “Google Mail Application” and only allowed you to view the gmail.com website? What I’m trying to point out is that your argument about why you don’t want mail in a browser is not very strong.
Sure, there are other reasons for not wanting it in a browser. The layout and rendering engine, while better than anything GTK or Win32 has to offer, is much inferior to WPF or Flash. And client-side processing operations (such as bit-wise manipulation of binary streams) are simply not available. But with the advent of XULRunner and Canvas support we are not too far away.
Now tell me why a browser is not a suitable host for a mail program?
I am afraid I agree with Joris. JavaScript is a harsh mistress. I spend a lot of time trying to get stuff working in IE that just works in FF, I think that keeps a lot of devs from using it more.
Along with this topic… Look at the msdn site, if ever there could be a place to use sweet sweet ajax love it would be in the ‘Library’. In fact since I started down the mono road, I find myself there more than I would have thought, and the first time I clicked the ‘+’ icon to read about a method I about choked when it reloaded the page.
I agree with “Jamie” everyone will try everything possible nothing in the world of technology is ever left un done, if it possible some one will try it. Even if it bombs, we will have tried it. Besides who wants the internet to become a dingy dusty space for information that never really changes. The great thing about the internet is that its dynamic and has new things.