David B. Calhoun’s Blog

You may have heard of the term “Web 2.0″ being thrown around here and there. You must have heard it by now especially if you are into web development on any level. There are some who think it’s just a word with no defined meaning, then there’s others who take its meaning very seriously. Look at the web development jobs offered on Craigslist, for instance, and you will see many listing referring to “Web 2.0″, along with all the other fun obscure terms associated with web development.

What is Web 2.0? As far as I can tell, it has several meanings:
1. (Website type) A type of website that offers the latest trends in social networking, multimedia, or viral content. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, etc.
2. (Website design) A website utilizing the latest in website layout and functionality. CSS, Ajax, JavaScript, Flash, Scriptaculous, gradients, etc.

These are pretty vague definitions, but I’m not sure they can be made more specific. And why did I separate the definition? Because a website can be 1 without being 2. For instance, up until recently, MySpace was a great example of 1, but they didn’t change their interface much in over five years, thus they weren’t an example of the latest and greatest in web layout and functionality. They FINALLY updated the site though, to bring it up to standards.

There’s a lot we can say about Web 2.0, but I don’t really hear a lot being said about what exactly made Web 1.0. In other words, what is now considered outdated? Here’s a few things I can think of:

1. HTML Frames (LONG outdated and out of favor, replaced by table-based layouts).
2. HTML Tables (replaced by CSS layouts).
3. Guestbooks (replaced by Blogs and built-in commenting).
3. Animated Gifs (replaced by still images, or images that change when moused-over).
4. Content-heavy pages (replaced by simple and effective pages like Google)
5. HTML Marquees (still used by teenage girls for their MySpace pages, but generally considered tacky and annoying).
6. Counters (replaced by more sophisticated web traffic monitors)
7. Webrings. You just don’t see these as often, if at all.