{"id":593,"date":"2006-11-25T09:41:56","date_gmt":"2006-11-25T16:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=593"},"modified":"2006-11-25T09:41:56","modified_gmt":"2006-11-25T16:41:56","slug":"is_web_20_the_w","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=593","title":{"rendered":"Is Web 2.0 the wrong path?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bill Thompson, in a fire-breathing essay<\/a> at The Register, offers a passionate technical critique of what he calls “the Web 2.0 fantasy,” arguing that the “snakeoil” of “Ajaxified” interfaces and “apparently open APIs” threatens to distract developers and engineers from the real work of creating “distributed systems, scalable solutions and a network architecture that will support the needs and aspirations of the next five billion users.”<\/p>\n

“Web 2.0 marks the dictatorship of the presentation layer,” he writes, “a triumph of appearance over architecture that any good computer scientist should immediately dismiss as unsustainable.” He continues:<\/p>\n

\n

Ajax is touted as the answer for developers who want to offer users a richer client experience without having to go the trouble of writing a real application, but if the long term goal is to turn the network from a series of tubes connecting clients and servers into a distributed computing environment then we cannot rely on Javascript and XML since they do not offer the stability, scalability or effective resource discovery that we need. There is a massive difference between rewriting Web pages on the fly with Javascript and reengineering the network to support message passing between distributed objects, a difference that too many Web 2.0 advocates seem willing to ignore.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He sees “a real danger that continued investment in Web 2.0 companies will turn [Tim] O\u2019Reilly\u2019s dream into our nightmare. If that happens then the oligarchy who benefit most from the stale socializing of Flickr and YouTube will have held back the transition to distributed systems.”<\/p>\n

Thompson ends his essay on a weird, through-the-looking-glass note of techno-utopian yearning: “If we sort out our interfaces and interactions we may even be able to put our heads into the screen, be part of the metaverse, enter cyberspace and interact fully and equally with agents, people, sims and any other machine- or human-generated intelligence.” That sounds pretty nightmarish itself. Nevertheless, Thompson’s critique of the reigning Web 2.0 ideology deserves a close reading and, one hopes, will spark some constructive debate.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Shelley Powers says<\/a> Thompson is all wet, writing of his article, “I can only see this as yet another cheap marketing ploy attached to Web 2.0.” Adds<\/a> Dan Farber: “A little focus on the presentation layer isn’t holding up the march to the metaverse. A few more cranks of Moore’s Law and the natural evolution of the Internet will be enough to overcome any ‘damage’ done by Web 2.0.” But Sadagopan says<\/a> Thompson is “spot on that there is a massive difference between rewriting Web pages on the fly with Javascript and reengineering the network to support message passing between distributed objects, a difference that too many Web 2.0 advocates seem willing to ignore.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bill Thompson, in a fire-breathing essay at The Register, offers a passionate technical critique of what he calls “the Web 2.0 fantasy,” arguing that the “snakeoil” of “Ajaxified” interfaces and “apparently open APIs” threatens to distract developers and engineers from the real work of creating “distributed systems, scalable solutions and a network architecture that will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}