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First released November 19, 2008
Cover image for post The Web 2.0 misery

The Web 2.0 misery

2008-11-19

Tobias Schlitt

In the past months, the term "Web 2.0" has been pushed as if it was a cool new Internet. Sorry, guys and girls, but this is bullshit. "Web 2.0" is the mis-term of the current and the past year. The "Web", if it ever existed, is a medium of several markup languages (especially HTML), which allows to provide information in a hyper-linked way over the Internet. It does not matter, which way you choose to provide this information (XTML, SVG or plain text). Beside that, "Web 2.0" seems to talk about rich-client interfaces over the web. Hello? XUL is quite old, ActiveX is even older and if you look at Citrix, you can provide "real" applications over the web.

In the past months, the term "Web 2.0" has been pushed as if it was a cool new Internet. Sorry, guys and girls, but this is bullshit. "Web 2.0" is the mis-term of the current and the past year. The "Web", if it ever existed, is a medium of several markup languages (especially HTML), which allows to provide information in a hyper-linked way over the Internet. It does not matter, which way you choose to provide this information (XTML, SVG or plain text). Beside that, "Web 2.0" seems to talk about rich-client interfaces over the web. Hello? XUL is quite old, ActiveX is even older and if you look at Citrix, you can provide "real" applications over the web.

So, please, stop that stupid "Web 2.0" term. It simply sucks.

Comments

Yes, I have stopped.. now I'm using Web 2.1 ;)

http://cheese.blartwendo.com/web21-demo.html

PS. Yes. Web2.x is meaningless marketting bullshit speak. AJAX is another XmlHttpRequest is as old as IE5.0, Remote Scripting, precursor to AJAX/JSON, has been around since IE4.

Ren at 2006-05-11

I couldn't agree more.

http://framework.zend.com/developer/changeset/316

Mike Naberezny at 2006-05-11

Lovely! :)

Toby at 2006-05-11

Web 2.0 really just suggests that the expected baseline CLIENT capabilities include a set of features that were not prevalent earlier on. It should be better called Client 2.0 but either way, it says something about how expectations have changed. Sure, we could have delivered many of these same applications in past years (and have in controlled environments) but now we can deliver them virtually everywhere just because ubiquitous clients have rich capabilities. It is marketing speak to be sure, but I think slightly less so than Ajax.

FWIW, I think we are still at Web 1.1 since that is the last version of the HTTP spec and THAT is the closest thing I see that approximates the "web" (not withstanding your correct assesment that the markup [and other] languages play a large role here as well).

boots at 2006-05-11

The web has no version number. It is not a specifically defined term. :)

With HTTP, I agree.

Toby at 2006-05-11

I disagree. Technically, you're correct. Yes, the technology has been around much longer, and yes, the 'web' technically consists of hypertext and other technologies.

But that is not what Web 2.0 is about. Web 2.0 is a movement, not a technology. It is the next generation of the internet. It is much broader than the set of technologies it is built upon.

For starters, it is the difference between the early, mostly static, web that was just a way of presenting information in various ways, to a new, more interactive, collaborative, way to deal with the web.

It's not just about Ajax. It's also about how sites like Flickr, del.icio.us and digg.com thrive and make the web to the collaborative experience it currently is.

It's also about how RSS and postcasts provide new ways of distributing information.

In many ways, the web is growing up. What better techie-term to apply to that than 'Web 2.0'? To me, the term fits perfectly.

Also, it's not about marketing. The best 'web 2.0' sites hardly do marketing. They grow because their communities embraced them for what they provide, for their usefulness.

Was the renaissance bullshit because paints and brushes already existed years before? No. So the fact that the technologies that make up Web 2.0 are older than the realisation that we're moving in a new direction does not make Web 2.0 bullshit either.

It's evolution.

It's combining existing technologies in creative ways and making them work in a way beyond what their inventors had thought of.

So please, stop the 'the web 2.0 is misery because the technologies already existed for years' bashing and start to realize that the internet IS evolving and maturing to a degree where we can truly speak of a 'next generation'.

We're all already a part of it, whether we want to or not. Welcome to the future.

Ivo Jansch at 2006-05-11

We don't get to define the vocabulary, we just get to build the technology that implements it. "Blog" is a stupid term as well, but it caught on and people now identify with it. The same goes for "Web 2.0". People identify that term with rich collaborative sites that do much more than send a static web page from the server to a broswer.

Rasmus at 2006-05-11

I'm so agree.

Web 2.0 just a crap thing. It's ok for few things, such as AJAX and tags. But another things are just shit.

Did you try this one? http://web2.0validator.com/

Firman Wandayandi at 2006-05-12

From a developers view, web 2.0 is great. It puts a set of methods to improve the user experience of a web application in a way the guys with the budgets understand. We have had the technologies enabling it for years, be we haven't be able to sell it, because no customer knew about the advantages of collaborative navigation, rich stateful javascript pages and service based web architectures. Now, thanks to Tim O'Reilly, we can explain it, and we can sell it. That does, IMHO, not suck at all.

Johann at 2006-05-12

Web2.0 is a marketing buzzword, which makes venture capitalists excited and encourages them to pour money into the industry, which is good for all of us :)

Aaron at 2006-05-12

Why bother? I mean, really?

Jan --

Jan Lehnardt at 2006-05-12