Web 3.0

SpunOne writes "Apparently Jeffrey Zeldman is as sick of Web 2.0 as many of us have become. In his latest article, titled "Web 3.0," he really sticks it to the Web 2.0 fan boys, and dispels a lot of the hype generated by our young new friends. It's easy to grow apathetic when a new idea gains so much traction so quickly, but his points are clear and accurate, and deserve consideration."

Where are the facts?

[shoolz]

The summary suggests that he really "he really sticks it to the Web 2.0 fan boys". But really, the article seems like nothing but a pissy rant. He doesn't put forward the issues and talk about them methodically.

As far as I can tell, the only salient point made is that wire-framing a site with AJAX is difficult.

Re:Paul Graham

[swb]

Most fanboys think that Paul Graham's take on his latest turd is a good read, too.

Which isn't to say that it might not be, but the cult-of-personality surrounding Paul Graham kind of gets old after a while.

Problem is not with refesh

[SmallFurryCreature]

It is with the back button. Try it with gmail and opera. It doesn't work as expected. Refresh don't matter, gmail does a "loading" thing and if your on a fast con you don't really see the refreshing anyway.

But the back button is the accepted way to back out of an unwanted action and if it is not handled as expected or at least disabled AND warned about then people get confused.

I do not and most web developers don't because we usually HATE the back button as it can really mess with your web apps. Use the fucking cancel button already.

Nonetheless your website has to work as expected.

I used non-refreshing pages for a long time. One of them was a long list of songs where I wished to cue songs to be played. Rather then load it each time you "selected" a song by clicking on an image and javascript would then request a new image wich was a script wich queed the song and returned an image to indicate it had been queed.

Granted AJAX goes a lot further and is very nice BUT I hardly see it as a web 2.0

Ofcourse I never was any good at getting millions needed to finance an upstart either.

If Web 2.0 gets the investment money flowing again then good luck to it. The bubble at least had the economy running. Something like the second law of thermodynamics, energy is never lost? Neither is money. For everyone who lost money in the bubble someone else earned it. Me! And frankly that is all that matters.

Jeffrey Zeldman

[Tune]

Jeffrey Zeldman is the author of Designing with Web Standards [zeldman.com] (and who was somehow never adequately punished for writing that book; please look inside [amazon.com] to see what I mean).

I recently made the mistake of buying that book a while ago, as it seemed to present information on ... well ... designing with web standards, you know, xhtml & css. Instead, I found it's a 400+ page rant on oldfashioned non-standard design. There's no information at all about design and hardly anything helpful on web standards.

So, though Jeffrey himself may think differently, IMHO it's silly to regard him as a authority on anything web related.

Re:what's

[feijai]

AJAXified scriptaculosity!!

For that hillarious made-up word alone you should be modded 5.

Re:Just a question...

[ubernostrum]

Who is this Jeffrey Zeldman?

He's well known among web designers who work with modern web standards, for a couple of reasons:

• A List Apart, the site that article is on, has long been considered one of the better publications for the web-design industry, and he's the one who started it.
• His article To Hell With Bad Browsers [alistapart.com] back in 2001 is seen by many as having really kicked off the move to modern standards-based web design and development.
• Since then he's been involved in a number of high-profile redesigns and a lot of web-standards advocacy, and is now considered one of the "gurus" of web standards.

Re:More like 0.2 than 2.0

[Bogtha]

no two Web browsers are ever quite the same; you're just dealing with differences between browsers rather than differences between OSes.

The portability problems with Ajax aren't that big. It's like porting from one UNIX to another - they all support basically the same interface, but all have some shortcomings.

You lose all the accessibility mechanisms that OS GUI frameworks have.

No you don't. Ajax etc is built on top of an HTML foundation, which includes accessibility mechanisms.

Everyone loves GMail, but navigating around it without a mouse is a real pain. No hotkeys, and an unpredictable tab order.

I hate the way GMail is always held up as an example. The code behind GMail is terrible. If the tab order is screwed up, then it's because the Google developers screwed up, not because Ajax was used. And if you want hotkeys, click 'Settings' and change the thing that says 'Keyboard shortcuts off' to 'Keyboard shortcuts on'.

Proper control of the layout of your UI.

Accessibility mechanisms and control over layout are mutually incompatible. Accessible interfaces require that the user has control over the layout, not the developer.

A whole lot of performance.

Things like Ajax usually speed up web applications. And if you are comparing web applications to desktop applications (your whole comment seems to be about desktop vs web rather than 1.0 vs 2.0), then web applications can still be faster - I can search my webmail faster than I can search my normal email.

Re:Oh boy.

[Americano]

In reading your comment, I can see two possible interpretations:

• In your rush to leave the first comment, you didn't read the fucking article, which bemoans the "Web 2.0" hype & frenzy.
  --OR--
• You did read the article, but your reading comprehension is sorely lacking.

From the article:

It was while attending that debate that my discomfort with the hype surrounding an emerging genre of web development turned into a full-blown hate-on. [ . . . ]

Re:what's

[WWWWolf]

(How do I indicate something's been updated or deleted without triggering duplicate entries in everyone's feed reader?)

RSS 2.0 has <guid> element or something along those lines. Atom has <id>. Those are supposed to give a single, unique ID to entries so they can be differentiated. Of course, the knowledge of site authors / CMS authors about that, and reader support for such niceties, mmm, spottyish stuff...

AJAX with XUL in Mozilla

[Nurgled]

It should be noted that it's possible to use AJAX with XUL in Mozilla. XUL gives you a UI toolkit based around a DOM, and while it has its shortcomings it's definitely a lot better than HTML. Since XUL is XML-based the same techniques used to deal with AJAX in HTML can be applied, but you also get XBL bindings which allow you to hide bundles of functionality behind opaque objects thus creating custom widgets. Also, both the builtin widgest and any custom ones can be styled using CSS so you can still get your brand in there.

Of course, it only works in Mozilla-based browsers. Not much good on the Internet right now, but at my company we have a few internal webapps based on the Mozilla "platform" which seem to work well for the users. I think this is a good place to head: all that's lacking is a good standard which serves the same purpose as XUL. XUL itself is adequate, but there are a few places where I think it needs a bit of work before it can be considered good enough for widespread development. XBL is already good, and for Mozilla browsers it can already be applied to HTML and SVG documents so it's by no means XUL-specific.

Microsoft seems to be heading in a similar direction with XAML. I think it'd be a good idea to get a good, general, open standard out there before Microsoft launches XAML and it's too late.