Web 2.0 this… Web 2.0 that… All we here is the wonder of this new apparently more responsive and pretty Web we’ve been used to in the last years startups and now some big players like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. Turns out that in my opinion Web 2.0 is not so great, Web 3.0 won’t be either. We live in the Control Revision systems, and Web 2.0 is simply that too – a bunch of patches.
HTML is not obsolete, by all means no!, it is just beeing updated so slowly that we barely see anything new mainly because the slow adoption rate of standarts IE show us. They have the lead market share, they control the limits of our applications and now they are pushing Silverlight as a fix to HTML in general. Problem is, its proprietary.
The ammount of time developers waste trying to test for cross-browser compability is already great, but will increase even more as Firefox approachs IE market share and more developers care about it. The technical differences become evident to any new developer coming to Firefox world, and I’m sure they miss many things they have in Firefox but can’t use just because it would create a huge gap of functionality between their users.
Javascript is a nice and cool language indeed. But it suffers exactly the same problems as HTML does. Altough Javascript concept is good, it lacks somethings: inheritance for example. This is a huge problem in the Web 2.0 world. When a developer need to keep focused and objective on something but still wants the best he ends up using several controls each with its own library and in the end several redudant features. Some features like inherirance could help solve major problems by abstracting code of controls, ajax, etc…
In resume, most of a Web Developers time is spent doing research and fixes to support multiple browsers, multiple AJAX/Toolkits for Javascript, etc… The end users ends up downloading more than needed and if you look close you’ll see that things like AJAX are mere hacks not really meant to do the Web more dynamic or responsive. We all lose.
