Henrik Igo reacts to our presentation of the proposal of Joe Geldart towards an Active Web. The intervention of Henrik is rather technical, but still of interest for non-developers.
Henrik Igo:
The Document web definition is fine, it is what anyone would consider “Web 1.0″. What I strongly disagree with is the authors criticism or belittlement of current “Web 2.0“. In my opinion a significant shift in the web happened with the maturation of the Firefox browser, which released an avalanche of web based applications and portals that made heavy use of JavaScript and CSS. (If someone wouldn’t like the term “Web2.0″ it may be better and clearer to call this “The advent of AJAX”.)
Before Firefox there where 2 browsers, Internet Explorer and Netscape that supported advanced JavaScript, but they supported totally different versions of it (the standardised version today is the IE one, a testament to the fact that MS indeed employs some very good programmers, the ones that happened to work on IE from 4.x to 6.x before 2001). Therefore most pages that tried to do anything with JavaScript or advanced CSS supported only one of these browsers, or sometimes tried to support both of them, often with poor results. And many in the universities or Open Source crowds for instance were still using text-based browsers - which is notable because at the time this group had significant mindshire in the web’s development. For all of these reasons use of JavaScript was considered evil by (in my opinion) a majority of web developers and what was then called “Dynamic HTML” was mostly a phenomenon of the Microsoft camp. (Even today if you use the web interface to Microsoft Exchange email, it is very nice on IE but barely usable on Firefox.)
With the advent of Firefox - which supported the then standardised IE style of JavaScript - the situation started changing, since there now was a standard, and a free multiplatform browser to support the standard. Quite soon very cool web based apps were born, led by Google maps, Google mail… This was called AJAX programming, as in Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Compared to Microsofts DHTML evangelisation this was much cooler technology than anyone had ever dreamt of, and availability of an Open Source browser to support it made also the opposition vanish. So imho this, and not IE4.x with DHTML support was the de fact next phase of the web.
At the same time we had developed some additional techniques - most signicant would prehaps be RSS and the family of XML markups used to provide blog feeds. This lead to a collaboration between websites beyond linking: You could provide parts of another blog or newssite on your own page, for instance. Or to take a very different example, BookMooch uses Amazon to provide data and cataloguing of books. Yet, BookMooch is a site for free sharing of old books, you’d think Amazon wouldn’t like “helping out” such a project. Not so, in reality lots of BookMooch users end up buying books on Amazon. In fact, BookMooch probably makes most of its income based on money they get from Amazon for these referrals.
AJAX combined with RSS and some other by then standard tools (wiki is a significant one) is in my opinion rightly called Web2.0. This is very different from the original document based web and rightly has been given its own name.
Web2.0 is NOT the social web (like FaceBook, LinkedIn). The social web is merely an application of Web2.0, technically it doesn’t contribute anything new. (Well, apart from FaceBooks innovation of letting 3rd parties develop applications embedded in its own site, that is a great innovation, but it is not “THE social web”.) Why the social web is so much hyped is in this context in fact a good question, I believe there is in fact a little pyramid scheme to it all. I mean Facebook is fun and all, but it isn’t THAT fun, I think the effective inviting mechanism plays a part.
This is the point we are now. Now for my own predictions:
Next we will see the advent of the Single sign-on web, most likely emodied in the form of OpenID. (SSO means you don’t have to create new logins for every site, you just use one main identity and password to log in to each site. Obviously the sites you log in to don’t get to know your password, they just accept the referral from your ISP, mail provider, or other OpenID provider you are using.) This imho will add further granularity to the web, in that users can come and go more fluidly than today, where you make a choice to register and join FaceBook but not something else. This in turn should foster a development where we can again have smaller sites providing one small funny little piece of the social web, instead of the monolithic FaceBooks of today. This would be in line with what Web2.0 was all about, Facebook et al are in fact a countertrend to the Web2.0 trend if seen in this light.
Whether a “decentralised social web” will arise from this is a good question, and whether the Global Giant Graph will emerge from that is an even better question. It might, but it might end up something entirely different. The GGG is technically possible today, and how OpenID works there are some similarities to the RDF used in GGG, so once OpenID becomes popular, the next step might be to not just externalise (or decentralise) your login credentials but also your social connections. But we will know the answer to this in something like 5 years.
The proposal in the end on new HTTP commands is just pure folly (it is just the wrong place to do it, period), which underlines that the author wasn’t just slightly off with his Web2.0 comments, but in fact knows nothing at all about the technology he is talking about. To implement such functionality by extending HTTP would imho be quite silly, and in fact a peer-to-peer protocol like SIP would probably be a better starting point in the first place, and even then you wouldn’t do it by commands like those, but you’d develop an XML based document language to transmit this kind of information.”
Michel Bauwens comment: Henrik, could it be that the Active Web proposal could have merit, without being tied to a specific technical proposal on how to implement it? It seems that your critique is focused on the latter mostly.
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