Web 2.0 marks the dictatorship of the presentation layer, a triumph of appearance over architecture that any good computer scientist should immediately dismiss as unsustainable.
“O’Reilly as Tito?” What a pile of geeky bs. Mr. Thompson is really pissed that real people stole his wet dream and made up a trendy name for it.
Of course the presentation layer rules, Mr. Thompson. Because that is the one part of the system that we all see. So nice data presented in a nice way, yes please. A solid, scalable architecture – that’s great, but as long as the system delivers, I really don’t care.
Maybe, Mr. Thompson, the users got tired of waiting for you developers to get your shit together and to start producing interfaces and services that made sense on top of that nice code that you do. So they chose the systems that provide valuable services in a nice, usable way. Who wouldn’t.
The web right now is developing much like an organism. Not everything is perfect and not everything is build to last – nor should it be. But never before has the web delivered so much value to so users.
Nobody said the Web 2.0 paradigm is perfect, but it’s there, and that’s more than you can say about your promised metaverse of a new generation, scalable, modular 8th generation internet med for people that speak hex. Amazon, Google and even Microsoft are delivering – you’re just talking.
If O’Reilly is Tito, then you’re that young German guy who, seeing the colorful decadence of the Weimar Republic, decided to make us all walk in line towards that promised Third Reich: Ze plaze in which all zystemz will wörk in the zame way and no one will waste prezious coding time on that filthy rich user experienze.
Arh – just kidding. But so were you, right?
Ouch! Still, nice to see some serious argument developing about the importance of having a proper and scalable architecture underneath the presentation layer. I’m not looking for uniformity, honest, just a recognition that the current dominant model has to be seen as a temporary solution. We don’t need everyone to do the same thing, but then again we don’t see TCP/IP as imposing an unbeable dictatorship on our network interactions – I’d like to see the protocol stack extended to allow real distributed objects.
Hi Bill,
Thanks for commenting.
Yes, ouch – well, I’m sorry, but your own article sure had an edge to it, so I just followed suit
But by all means, let’s leave long dead dictators out of the equation from now on.
I don’t think we disagree on the general importance of doing things right, making things scalable and planning ahead, but the trend always seems to be that master plans don’t drive anything. Web 2.0 is just O’Reilly’s name for an emergent phenomenon happening on the less-than-perfect, stateless thing we call the web.
While Web 2.0 is already happening and is teaching business men new ways to earn money and users new ways to interact, it’s going to be a tough one to agree on extending the protocol stack and deciding on standards that both Microsoft, SUN, Cisco and 1000 other large players are happy with. Not that we shouldn’t try that if you and your colleagues find it necessary, but there’s no need to pick on Web 2.0 or the presentation layer in general.
Web 2.0 hasn’t done anything wrong – you’ll find no storm troopers or death stars there, it’s just a user centred way of using the existing technologies, flawed as they might be, and it’s not just window dressing either.
(Aaargh: Proving your point: At the moment my Flickr account cannot connect to the Blogger “API” Standards, please
Best regards,
Klaus