My thoughts on Web Technologies and Web 3.0
Just to caution, this post might not be very well written. I just wrote what came out of my head.
I’ve been developing with web technologies for a few years now. I started in the bleak times of what is now considered Web 1.0. If you don’t remember Web 1.0, it was the time when web pages were read only. When there was very little interactions at all, just static pages. Those were the days of HTML. HTML did everything from the structure of the page to the style and the graphical look.
Today, we live in a world of Web 2.0. In this concept, using HTML to create the actual look of a page is obsolete. We only use HTML to add the skeleton to the page, then we use something called styles, either through Javascript DOMs or a CSS file to make the graphical look of the page. Web 2.0 is also about communities and making the internet more dynamic.
Lately there has been talk about Web 3.0, something about databases and other random assets. To tell you the truth I’m trying to build a system that is separate from the normal idea of web development. You see, places like Youtube or Google have really shown the power of a technology called AJAX and the advancements of javascript, php, and rss. I’m currently working on a system that utilizes Javascript, php, rss, and other technologies with the technique of AJAX to create not only a dynamic website, but to give it a more physical feel and experience. Another words, I want it to be similar to a desktop based system, but designed specifically for web browsers. Just to clarify, this is not a WebOS, or web operating system,I’m making a web application platform(A little different).
Along with this, I want to make a very clean simplistic design, I don’t like a lot of clutter on webpages, just like I don’t want my desktop to be cluttered. Some examples of websites which are cluttered with junk are: yahoo.com, msn.com, cnn.com, and myspace.com. This “clutter” might work with some seasoned users, but new users might become very confused, and other users might not like a bunch of junk on a webpage that they never even look at.
Yahoo should learn from Google. Don’t through everything up on the homepage, have a few needed or important items, keep it clean, and keep it simplistic. If a user wants a function of some sort on the homepage, let them add it themselves, that way what they want is on the homepage and what they don’t want isn’t. That’s one of the big reasons for iGoogle.
Now to get back to web development languages like HTML, CSS, Javascript, and so forth. Making a basic generic website is easy, and actually it’s more than just easy. Today, not only are there very powerful web designing programs on the market, but there are free code snippets and libraries everywhere online. If you want your own blog, for instance, just download wordpress and add it to your site. It’s that easy to make any generic website.
Now if you want to make a unique website, that’s a different story. It’s rare to find a unique place on the web these days. From places like MySpace to Twitter, they all look the same to me. All I see is an evolution of the web, but I don’t want to see an evolution. What i want to see is a revolution. What I mean is, I don’t want the web to get better, I want it to change. For example, Microsoft Windows is a platform that has been around since 1985. MIcrosoft has made big changes with Windows, going from Windows 1.1 to Windows 3, then 95 to 2000. I’ve seen many leaps with it, but the truth is Windows has always been Windows. In truth, Windows has never gone away from what it once was. I’ve actually seen programs from Windows 1.1 running in Windows XP. You see Windows isn’t revolutionizing itself, it’s evolving because it’s the same Windows but with a few upgrades. To create a revolution, Microsoft would have to throw away Windows entirely and start from scratch. Microsoft said Windows Vista would be a whole new operating system from the ground up, but in truth it’s the same old Windows.. Now to show you an example of a revolution, Apple’s Mac OS X. Mac OS X is not an evolved form of Mac OS 9. The reason is, it’s different from the ground up. It has a different Kernel, a different application layer, and it even has a completely different origin of development.
Web 2.0 was never a revolution, it was only an evolution from Web 1.0, and it appears Web 3.0 is the same. I am truly sick of this; I’m moving away from the generic ways of web development. Right now I’m using Javascript, a language that barely supports object-oriented programming, to create a pure object oriented language. With this I hope to create a very dynamic web environment that people can easily understand, navigate, and even add to. I wish I could say more than this, but I really can’t on a public blog. At this point I feel like I might have already said to much.
In the end, I hope developers of internet browsers will start supporting the set standards of w3 a lot more, and I hope the standards expand. I personally hate how scripting languages work with each other like HTML and CSS, I believe someone should come up with a more advance object oriented system as a web standard. Even Javascript feels outdated compared to something like Objective-C.
At this point, the web platform I’m developing, code named Pyro, will NOT work with Internet Explorer. I want to keep my code as clean as possible with as little hacking and slashing as I can do. Web developers might know what I mean by hacking and slashing, ff not: it has to do with browser compatibility. No two browser are the same. This means I want to follow the standards almost all the way down the list. Internet Explorer does very little to follow standards at this point, so it will probably not work. It seems IE 8 will be web standards compliant, but all I can do is hope.
Tags: ajax, css, dom, firefox, html, ie, internet explorer, javascript, php, safari, standards, technology, w3, web, web 2.0, xhtml
