Tobias Wallin.com - Personal blog

What is web 2.0? - 2006-03-09

An interpretation of the web 2.0 concept.

What is web 1.0 about?
Web 1.0 was all about sharing information, the markup language HTML was born based upon SGML followed by Ecmascript (as you might know as Javascript). The internet was a big mess back in the 90's, mostly because of Netscape and Microsofts non standard development of the languages.

Today the w3c organization has come a long way cleaning up languages like html to the new standard XHTML. But even now websites are still coded with non-standard methods. I can't express the importance of standards enough, why? because internet is about sharing information, to all people.

What is web 2.0 about?
Well as I explain web 1.0 was about sharing information. Web 2.0 is about communicating information.

Users will judge your website in less than one second, you must get the visitors attention before that time.

If you've read about web 2.0, you should be familiar with concepts like Ajax, big fonts and rounded corners. All which seem to be a part of the big web 2.0 hype.

Graphical guidelines
What is the deal with these big fonts? As I said before, a visitor judge your site in less than a second, if you have a big and clear topic, that might just convince the visitor to stay long enough to start reading your information. The information must of course be relevant to the visitor.

Rounded corners? let's explain this with an example. If you have two boxes on top of each other with different content, you might put 10 pixels of space or so between them to separate the boxes apart. That will probably be enough if you have a small site but if you have a large site with many of these boxes you might want to but some extra effort in separating them.

It's all about communicating your information in the quickest possible way. internet users are not patient.

But are these rules to make your website "be" web 2.0? No. That is ridiculous, these are guidelines meant to help you creating a good design. You don't need to create extreme font sizes. Like many trends, people go to far. Just remember one thing; don't design for returning visitors, design for new visitors. Short, consist and clear information.

So now I've gone through the basic graphical guidelines. I's time to explain Ajax.

What's the deal with Ajax?
I won't go into technical terms or descriptions about Ajax for what I want to communicate is the basic principle of why one should use Ajax for certain things. I'll summarize Ajax as a way to make requests to a database without refreshing the website (This is of course not a full description of what you can do with the Ajax technique).

Let's say that you post a comment to this article. without Ajax the whole page would have to flash in order to make the mysql request. This flash may seem irrelevant to you but it makes internet users lose their focus, and if they lose their focus, they lose their interest. It can also be scary when users handle transactions over the internet such as web shopping, it's natural that people want to have full control over a situation where the website is processing their credit card information.

The human wants to understand and control. It's the designers job to make them understand. It doesn't matter how beautiful a website is if regular users don't understand it.

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Jayne

Fantastic :))) I have been searching all day for my university course about Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 and have slowly ended up almost going up my own ****. Thankfully I fell upon your article which explains it in simple language.I am now going off to email friends to come read for themselves...

Juli

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