Signs of the times: the old web vs. the new web
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 In other words, what is now considered outdated?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 HTML Frames (LONG outdated and out of favor, replaced by table-based layouts).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.
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:24 pm
I know this post is a bit old but wanted to chime in since i just located your site. I believe the difference between Web 2.0 and 1.0 is the way in which the user deals with the content. Again this is just the non technical side of 1.0 vs 2.0. In 1.0 the user could not share the content and personalize the content as easy as it is now. End the transition to a web 2.0 mind set where the user had more power.
In terms of technology, 2.0 is more of a Asynchronous based tech approach. Ajax, Flex, Advanced CSS skills, and to a large extent Restful/Web-Service fundamentals (SOA) are what the companies look for when they ask for “Web 2.0 experience”
Personally I think there is a slight push now for the term, Web 3.0. 2.0 allows users to share content across many sites while 3.0 will allow content to be given meaning. Semantic Web. :-p
October 9th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Thanks for the comment, man! I’m so used to getting spam comments, so it took me a while to find this. Also because of some server issues..
That’s true, I suppose giving the user more power and making websites more of a social network are the main trends. I think things are headed in an awesome direction. Moving desktop computing to the web or cloud computing is an interesting idea and I definitely think we’re headed there, but I’m not sure if were ready for it yet.
Douglas Crockford gave his keynote today at the Yahoo Frontend Engineering Conference - in it he mentioned both the current HTML standard and the current version of Javascript were last updated in 1999, almost ten years ago! People have done amazing stuff with that limitation, but it will be interesting to see how we progress beyond that. What new type of frameworks or technologies will browsers experiment with so we can get even more awesome stuff out there?