71 To summarize …

What honorable Mr. Zeldman has laid out before us in this article is a hint as to how to be ahead of the rest in everything related to the Web.

By perceiving correctly the objective of Web’s existance we can understand how to develop it correctly thus being able to create great solutions.

Great solutions, in turn, bring money!

posted at 01:17 pm on January 22, 2006 by Vadim Gilead

72 Silly Season is back

Thanks to Zeldman for a solid article.

Where I work (non-agency), they’ve gotten all steamed up about AJAX. It takes just a day or two and all the developers are swooning over this (not-so) new technology, whether they’ve actually looked beyone the shiny packaging or not.

It’s taken me six months to get these same people to consider the benefits of putting a doctype in their HTML!

posted at 11:32 am on January 23, 2006 by Mike Padgett

73 Web 3.0? Let's work on 1.0 and 2.0 first

Kudos to Zeldman for a great article and lots of great insight (and funny anecdotes).

As Padgett seems to be implying above, developers should concentrate on conforming to web standards before they try and jump on the AJAX bandwagon. The only reason that AJAX is ever a “bitch” to wire-frame is when your JavaScript doesn’t follow the correct DOM, or your markup doesn’t fit a standardized doctype.

Even Google doesn’t conform to standards—by far! Most of their sites don’t even have a doctype (gasp!). This holds true for almost all corporate or enterprise sites out there. AJAX is much easier to incorporate if you follow strict XHTML and the DOM.

And a side note—PHP and (especially) Ruby on Rails are never anything that Google, Yahoo, or any of the bigwigs would ever want to use. Most use Python as the back end, along with JavaScript and the DOM, of course.

posted at 11:25 am on January 24, 2006 by Andrew Peace

74 pretty heads held high

we love you, mr. zeldman.

posted at 03:47 am on January 25, 2006 by Chrissy Weese

75 Untitled

I really hate these moronic “articles” about semantics, design, ethereal thoughts about position absolute and relative, accessibility is paramount but validation can suck my ass. I like the way you write, it makes a lot of sense and you don’t have googleads or whatever in the middle of your page, a lot of people have taken advantage of your influence, you need to make yourself clearer so to speak.

posted at 04:29 am on January 27, 2006 by Ricardo Carrasco

76 Poe's Pendulum

As a web design hobbyist with almost a decade of partially completed projects under my belt, I have jumped on a few bandwagons. Looking back, it seems that just as soon as I’d even begin to get the hang of something, it was time to drop it like yesterday’s soiled underwear and race on to the fresh virginal scent of tomorrow’s homecoming princess. Since I don’t get paid for web design, I have lost some of my early feelings of urgency to ‘keep on top,’ particularly since I began frequenting excellent resources like ALA a few years ago and discovered the joys of xhtml and css (along with the agony of a few hundred frustrating hacks for making IE work). I must say I am very glad to see web standards finally gaining some of the attention they deserve, even if that attention comes from fads or greed.

But I have another major interest, this one going back as long as I can remember, which has greatly matured and expanded over the past few years as well. I am a map geek. From the age of about 5, I could spend hours (later days) at a time simply spinning my globe, looking through atlases, poring over road maps, grabbing every last tourist brochure with any sort of map or location image at the ferry terminal, and even standing in the rain at a bus stop, memorizing the routes. Then I became a commercial fisherman and diver through most of my twenties, and I got hooked on nautical charts. So when I discovered GIS mapping (basically mapping databases) in the late 90’s, I knew this sort of thing would be in my future, at least as a hobby. I never have minded that people think I am strange for my map obsession. We all have our quirks, and that isn’t something that people are generally bothered or scared by. Although circumstances have prevented me from jumping headlong into GIS as I had hoped, I have plugged away at increasing my knowledge and skill in this fascinating field.

Then, in the past couple of years, the lid blew off. With Google Earth, now everybody thinks they like maps. Actually, they just like to ‘ZOOM,’ but that is a discussion for another forum. As a frequenter of the NASA WorldWind community forums and IRC channel (I write docs sometimes and help a little with tech support on occasion), it seems now that hardly a day goes by without a new development or bandwagon startup in this once comfortably geeky field. Now, when I hear the word AJAX, it makes me cringe to think of what new application somebody is going to come up with in one of my two main fields of interest, and how much further will I suddenly fall behind in the mad rush.

Sometimes I feel like Poe’s condemned prisoner lashed beneath the pendulumn as it slowly cuts deeper . . .

Thanks for the insightful article, and the last 5 years of consistently great reading (on my part).

posted at 06:47 pm on January 28, 2006 by Seth Steben

77 a compromise on web n.n

First of all, thank you for this wonderful article! It’s really comforting to know that not everybody is on a plain hype cloud number 7. As a Web Developer I am also a little puzzled why people are pushing technologies that are up to 5 years old as the latest buzz and the Web 2.0 in general. But on a second glimps I have to say, it’s just marketing. It’s nothing special about it, it’s just that there is a little more money for web development than there was in the last 5 years and marketing guys are taking advantage of that.
So what can the tech guys do about it? As for me, be happy. The latest development on the web gives us much more possibilities to experiment and try to develop new application models. One example is social software, as done by flickr or del.icio.us. Let’s be honest, there wasn’t much interesting stuff hapening in the last 5 years, which you liked so much. We might have had the technologies (DHTML, flash, etc.) but nobody was willing to take the risk of trying something new. And the crowd of students doing our work (not quite professional but in a good-enough manner) at a price of a chinese sweat-shop worker wasn’t too comforting at all.
Web development seems to have a kind of up and down manner. Either hype or flop. As soon as a hype starts, the marketing guys get in and find some fancy words that sell (by the way the vocabulary on the 90’s hype wasn’t any better). From a technical perspective, why should we care? We can go and propose our engineering ideas and visions to the marketing guys and they will say: “oh yeah, we call this blabla. It’s the new bla.”, but whatever they call it, we can develop it, because there finally is the money and will for it. So this really is a cloud number 7 I like to be on and I am pretty sure that developers have had enough great ideas in the last 5 years which they finally want to go for.
So whatever web version we want to call it, let’s just say we don’t like marketing too much, but we gladly take their money to develop want we think the web needs (hey, finding something chilling and new is always kind of trial and error, for anything else humankind has proven just not to be smart enough). I like my field of work wheter it’s called web, web 2.0 or web.flop and I am looking forward to some great new applications out there!

By the way, for all technical guys on being ask what you do: just tell them you are a software engineer, then you’re neither seen with disgust nor adored, you’re just the good old nerd.

posted at 08:13 am on February 3, 2006 by gabriel hase

78 commentary

excellent article.

posted at 06:42 pm on February 7, 2006 by Eric Needle

79 I'm So Behind

I am just rounding the corner to the finish line of WEB 0.5. At this pace, I’ll never catch up, or be hip! I’m getting too old for this crap.

posted at 02:48 pm on February 22, 2006 by Randy Cantrell

80 Library 2.0

Uh oh… get ready for Library 2.0. Lucky library-types like myself can gain fabulous insights from individuals who refer to themselves as “information mavens”. I suspect the Library 2.0 phenomenon will be just as irritating as Web 2.0. Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of fine, fine web 2.0 apps out there and there are great ideas behind library 2.0. But, the smug hipster mentality drives me nuts. How do these librarians find the time to continually blog and comment on fellow hipster-librarian’s blogs? Don’t any of them work at public service desks? Manage staff? Catalog? Provide hands-on tech support? Manage online databases? Maybe my library is sadly underfunded. We do manage several library 2.0 type services, but just barely.

posted at 11:06 pm on March 1, 2006 by feeder goldfish