The Next Web?
by Simon St. Laurent
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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.
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- Lockout Services locksmith Los Angeles 1-310-925-1720 Locks Lockout Locked Out
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- Lockout Services locksmith Los Angeles 1-310-925-1720 Locks Lockout Locked Out
2009-06-30 17:40:33 carpetcare [Reply]
Lockout Services locksmith Los Angeles 1-310-925-1720 Locks Lockout Locked Out
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- Note sure about RDF , very sure about tagging and Ajax
2006-04-03 04:27:42 paulbrowne [Reply]
Despite having developed an RDF search engine - http://red-piranha.sourceforge.net - was never sure it would take off. Basically users are lazy (this is good) and RDF didn't give enough back. Tagging on the other hand gives users something (e.g. Organising their bookmarks), which is is why it has taken off , despite it being just another form of meta data.
Likewise Ajax gives something to both user and developers (cool but powerful webapps), which is why Ajax has such a buzz right now (even though the frameworks are still a *little* bit clunky, though improving fast).
- old is the new new
2006-03-24 08:12:27 mentata [Reply]
It is noteworthy how unpopular approaches can get new life after a period of dormancy; just observe how much fellow commenter Mr. Bullard sounds like me circa 2002, dusted off for a fresh wave of saucy weblog snarking :)
Your article reinforces my own tack. I will freely admit that the ways I follow progress in software is based on Larry Wall's laziness virtue, but that doesn't make them bad. I keep reading, but as I assume all developers do to a degree I assign risk to technologies in flux because I don't like to waste time learning the syntactical details and subtleties of some paradigm that won't have lasting relevance. For the record, neither working with RSS 1.0 nor naming my fledgling software project in the article title (http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/07/16/ldaphttp.html) were my idea.
Since my earliest professional days, Microsoft was a non-starter (remember Windows 3.1?). I skipped Motif at the advent of the web, I saw SGML as powerful but too complicated, and I yearned to do far less tcl programming than I was eventually forced to. Instead I invested most heavily in HTML, HTTP, Perl, and Java, which have all proven to be keepers.
I knew XML would be a winner, but the many standards that immediately followed were nascent. I think SOAP misses the point completely even if it's become the boat. XHTML is appropriate, though parsing it honestly doesn't do much for screen scraping. Many web service languages translate to spaghetti for the 21st century enterprise even if the burden of understanding them will be split more evenly between the computers and programmers. I'll add that you weren't the only one holding out for a better XML/CSS union, and I'm not convinced it's time to give up yet considering how weakly web browsers support XML in general.
Then there's AJAX. I systematically avoided serious reliance on Javascript because of variablilities in its implementation, strange constructs in its coding, and uncertainty in its future. Alas, the problem has always been there: no other broadly supported way to make web interfaces rich. AJAX doesn't prove that instict wrong, it proves I was right because now I can potentially spend a shorter amount of time learning a consistent XML language for solid interfaces instead of wasting time writing and testing questionable homebrew Javascript routines.
The semantic web has been an idea in circulation for a while, and it seems to describe what we're moving towards even if the specifics of the vision haven't been implemented in one swipe. With the momentum and ubiquity of LDAP and HTTP protocol use on our networks, it occurred to me that their synergy could give us something close. That's my own cross, perhaps, but judge for yourself (http://www.mentata.com/ldaphttp/examples/mesh/) if combining them, couching the calls in REST, and making the data simultaneously available directly from the directory (sorry, not yet demonstrated outside my private network) makes any sense. Even if you don't browse any of the thousands of resulting pages, Google will. Note also that even a semantic web benefits from identity knowledge.
In the meantime, while I agree that Web 2.0 is more a brand name than a well-articulated vector, it says in a phrase where we want to go. Good luck filling in those blanks, and thanks for the thoughtful essay.
- Merchandising Prophecy
2006-03-16 06:32:02 Len Bullard [Reply]
History is written by the winners. Technology is developed by the losers. To make light speed, cut the mass at the point of acceleration. In English, dump the excess features: See XML.
AJAX/Web 2.0 is the XML enablement the not-web markup people knew would happen. We never stopped using markup, data islands, DHTML or any of the other app languages such as VML that are laying around for the taking in the form of dlls. We're still building VRML97 worlds out here too. Faster machines, bigger pipes, and practice in the woodshed is the way to reinvent old technology and old acts. The touring season comes every spring.
If you want to be a prophet in computer science, it's easy (although the cycle time varies): pick any application which fails the first time but has a loyal following and wait ten years. At eight years, give it a new name if the old one has suffered too much reputation-damage and push it as the Next New Thing. Be sure you have real customers for it before you do that. Pay some pundits or bloggers for press, start a few fights on lists, have a conference. This is the same game played in entertainment and it works. BuzzBuilding. Note, it doesn't always require high quality product but if you want to sustain the buzz and make more dollars, it does. See American Idol (besides Kelly Clarkson who was a well developed act before she auditioned, who is still standing?)
O'Reilly is very far out on the limb with the Web 2.0 meme. Luckily, like Rupert Murdoch, having a publishing empire means one gets to write a history and make one's own reality real. But a good historian and any practical engineer sees through that and just builds code that runs and meets the requirements of a customer leaving the mythmaking and the heroism to those who merchandise such.
Every year there is a new American Idol but the same old Simon, Randy and what's her name of cheerleader dance fame.
