Simon Morris's Blog: December 2006 Archive

David Van Couvering wrote an interesting blog entry recently which caught my attention. He gave a 'heads up' to a discussion stemming from a recent Tim O'Reilly blog entry (which in turn referenced other blogs, go check the original for details) debating the merits of the term "Web 2.0". The debate bounced back and forward across a couple more blog entries (and some private emails, by the sounds of it) and ended with Tim seeming to agree that the term Web 2.0 was misleading, as it suggests a HTTP/HTML centric approach.

David brings the rather long discussion into focus, by asking whether the web (HTTP/(X)HTML/CSS/Ajax/etc.) is really an ideal platform to deliver the promise of Web 2.0, and ponders what is stopping other platforms (JWS, for example) from gaining traction in this space.

As you may recall from a blog entry some time back, I'm no great fan of the web browser as an application delivery platform. Proponents coo and whoop every time someone manages to bludgeon a rebellious HTML rendering engine into mimicking a user interface 'effect' we had on the desktop two decades ago! Sometimes it feels like UI software development suffered a massive stroke sometime back in the late Nineties, and is having to slowly relearn how to do basic things like menus, lists, text highlighting and cursor tracking.

I broadly agree with David's blog (although one comment about Derby makes me wonder if he subscribes to the belief that relational databases are appropriate on the desktop when one merely wants data storage.) I'm not going to rehash his arguments here. Instead I want to throw out some random ideas about as to what a desktop Web 2.0 platform would require.

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