IglooCoder is getting tenacious. In his latest article, he references a post from Coding Horror that attempts to vilify Web 2.0 by trotting out Jakob Nielsen and his ubiquitous list of web design mistakes.
While I agree that Web 2.0 might not be the best name and the marketing behind it is driven by a bunch of profit-hungry jackals that are looking to start the next dot-com craze, the moniker is definitely drawing a line between a web site and a web application.
I'm guessing that most of the folks reading this blog are web developers. How many times have you been at a party, told people that you develop software for the web and then were immediately asked by somebody if you can help them build their web page' How many of you have had their dad, brother, cousin, neighbour or dog ask for help with their web page' I have and I'm not very fond of it.
I am a web application developer. I am not a web page developer. I use many different languages and programs to build my applications. While HTML is one of the languages that I use, FrontPage is not one of the programs.
Jakob Nielsen certainly has some good ideas when it comes to design for web pages. In addition to pushing for cleaner web pages, he touts a lot of the standards that will help impaired people use the web. And I completely agree with him that frames are an absolutely awful part of the web.
But Web 2.0 is not about web pages or web sites. It's all about using the web as a platform for applications. This isn't a new idea ' it's been around for years. Even AJAX, one of the signposts of being a Web 2.0 application, is simply a marriage of Javascript and XML that has existed for quite a long time as a technology. Web 2.0 is hot right now because high-speed internet access is approaching ubiquity in North America. If you doubt that fact, try pulling out your old 56K modem and then going to Google Maps or Flickr. Painful, eh'
Web 2.0 and the web applications that it represents are the next step for the web. They will sharpen the blurred lines between web designers and web developers. But even though these applications have a '2.0' faux-version number, they are in their infancy and need some time to mature. Maybe that's why the word 'beta' is pretty much synonymous with Web 2.0'
Lately, I've been calling myself a software developer because I'm tired of people asking me to help them with their web page. When you call yourself a software developer, people at parties don't really ask you any more questions about your job. But if Web 2.0 starts to pick up some steam and becomes a mainstream term, I'll be completely happy calling myself a web developer again.