The Next Web?
by Simon St. Laurent
|
Pages: 1, 2, 3
While all of this was rearranging the furniture that already existed in HTML, there were a few other initiatives which promise to enrich the set of choices. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) promises manipulable graphics to complement the images we have now, while XForms offers a new generation of vastly more flexible web-based forms.
Currently, XHTML 2.0 promises to rearrange XHTML, finally cleaning up features that have been marked for deletion for years and developing a new path forward for browser vendors and developers. Unfortunately, it hasn't been that simple. XHTML 2.0 collided with the failed dreams of XLink a few years ago, and now faces an uprising from browser vendors who'd rather make smaller changes through the invitation-only decision-making process of the WHATWG.
As much as I'd like to see XHTML of some form happen, once again we're missing a "practical plan for deploying it." Who's going to migrate? What drives that migration into mainstream web development?
AJAX and Web 2.0
I first started writing during the heat of the browser wars. A cool new feature would appear in one browser or another, and everyone rushed to copy it, where possible. The last few years have been very different, with Internet Explorer moldering away as Firefox, Opera, and a small host of other new browsers focused on cool new features that didn't make big changes to the HTML itself. The basic functionality stayed the same, but over the last year or so--greatly helped by the final demise of Netscape 4.0--developers have made huge strides using tools that were designed and implemented in the late 1990s.
While all of these other proposals for the Next Web require substantial new infrastructure, AJAX instead does a wonderful job of applying a technology that was frequently derided in the early days of XML: Dynamic HTML, which combined JavaScript and HTML. AJAX even frequently combines that technology with XML for data, and once again relies on the Web's foundation protocol, HTTP, for hypertext transfer. Even within the strict bounds of web browsers' JavaScript sandboxes, where programs are allowed to contact only the server from which they came, it turns out that there is an incredible amount that developers can do. AJAX frees web pages from the old model of regular trips from the client to the server and back.
As it turns out, the server-side support for AJAX can also frequently act as an interface to the server that can be used by other programs, without the need for a browser. Developers who craft smart APIs on their servers for use by AJAX-based web pages can then expose those APIs to other developers, getting the benefits of better interfaces for users who use web browsers to consume the data and for users who have their own custom programs consuming the data. Depending on how carefully the developer models AJAX transactions on traditional web HTTP transactions, these services even look a lot like the REST approach proposed earlier for web services.
The success of AJAX, and the business models it opens, have driven talk of Web 2.0. The definition of Web 2.0 varies depending on who you talk to, and there's some clear pushback against one of the more explicit efforts to define Web 2.0. I've suggested that Web 2.0 is what happens when you cleanly separate web client logic from web server logic, but that's also probably too broad a definition to be useful.
Whatever the version number of the Web may be today, the AJAX resurgence has a lesson. After waiting for all of those promises of better tools to come, it seems that developers looked at the parts they had available, and chose the ones they could use today. It can be annoyingly hard work, but the results are impressive.
- Note sure about RDF , very sure about tagging and Ajax
2006-04-03 04:27:42 paulbrowne - old is the new new
2006-03-24 08:12:27 mentata - Merchandising Prophecy
2006-03-16 06:32:02 Len Bullard
