That about it?

Someone in their own words tell me. I appreciate the links, Jeff, but tell me in your words. The links were good. Give me the “elevator speech”.

John Gruber wrote a BBEdit CSS Syntax Checker. Unfortunately, to keep the CSS model up-to-date, he has to screen-scrap the information off the W3C pages.

This is unfortunate because “screen-scraping is an ugly, ad-hoc, last-resort technique that is very likely to break on even minor changes to the format of the data being snooped” - The Jargon File

What would be ideal is if the W3C offered a consistant API to access their standards. For instance some possible requests:

http://www.w3c.org/css.xml might return a simple xml list of all the versions of CSS. This would serve as a starting point for other requests like:

http://www.w3c.org/css?level=2&revision=1&section=4.1.1 would return an xml file of the Tokenization specs for CSS 2.1.

And suddenly, because of the adherance to a standard, other people can start using that information… for what? Who knows! The sky is the limit! It opens up the possibility to use the information elegantly, for unexpected reasons, and not with a bunch of hacking.

Google and Flikr are using new trends to make the information in their databases accessible to others so that others can take what they have created and use it for another application. An example would be Google Maps. Others have used the information for the “maps” and built another interface application that helps people find apartments or map the movement of hurricanes.

RSS is making information accessible in that I do not have to browse to find information that I want but I can “subscribe” and that info comes to me. RSS is what makes podcasting different from just posting an mp3 on a website.

So in a nutshell, I understand Web 2.0 to be about making information more accessible, both for users and developers.

At least that’s what I’m understanding it to be.

Let’s say a programmer writes a program called “Web” where static pages are posted and accessed by people going to those pages to see what’s new. This would be the old web or Web 1.0. The way the web used to be back in the beginning.

Now there is so much different from the old web, people are calling it Web 2.0. In the “new” web, you have podcasting, blogging, rss feeds, and thousands upon thousands of people sharing information and working off each other. Not to mention the information people are sharing is not only text, but pictures, films, music and spoken audio.

So if someone is boasting Web 2.0 they are probably talking about some new technology; a new way of thinking; or a new way of collaborating. If your web site uses fairly new features vs just throwing up static pages and hoping someone comes by to read them, then you’d probably be considered part of the society of Web 2.0. It describes a huge puzzle where the pieces are changing all the time.

In the future when things we do now are considered old, people will probably start talking about Web 3.0

Lisa <- a wanna be effective web minister

Come back here anytime!

Lisa <- ever in the learning stages