So, I don’t know if it’s still there, but as of this writing the banner ad above the first post is advertising some sort of conference for W-E-B Two-Point-Oh (hereafter referred to as “The Term“). When you click (not that I am advocating such a thing) it actually tries to open a pop up window (because popups are the new new thing, after all).
I am so ashamed.
I grow less enamored with The Term daily. I hate the ubiquity of it. It means nothing, and passionate misguided attempts to make it mean something only wind up sounding contradictory or vague (at best) or just plain stupid (at worst).
Now, some of the actual components, sites, and web applications which supposedly make up the body of the web labelled by The Term are great. Ajax is a fantastic tool, used appropriately. Social connections are a Good Thing (and are not, IMHO, new). Better web apps are, by definition, better, so yay for that.
There’s no denying that you can make a case that there is a new generation of web sites, applications, and techniques. Arguably, some of these are in some ways “better”. Still, The Term has become a stupid buzzword, which means less every day.
The web — that being, a technology invented by Tim Berners-Lee to be a venue for online hyperlinked documents and other media — has not changed at all. You will have to repeat that to yourself a few times to get it to sink in, but it’s the truth. The web we have today is what the World Wide Web was supposed to be (arguably, it is still moving towards what it was supposed to be). There is no New New Internet. Pull back the skin for a second; what do you see? HTML, XML, JavaScript, server-side programming languages (just because it’s not in /cgi-bin doesn’t make it revolutionary), and HTTP. See anything new there?
Argh. (Oh yes — today was Talk Like a Pirate Day… that “argh” will have to do, for now.)
The biggest change I can see is that we’re using a heckuva lot more bandwidth. Is this “Bandwidth 2.0″?
…
Besides, everyone knows the enterprise wouldn’t adopt it until 2.1 anyways.
