Rael's View
O’Reilly CTO Rael Dornfest believes that we’ve trained ourselves to accept disappointment from web applications. He maintains that Web 2.0 is about apps that meet our real expectations.
This is Rael, photographed at EuroOSCON in Amsterdam.
The evening after the conference several of us were chatting about what was good, what could be improved, the fabulousness of Damian Conway and the possibility of evolving into Cory Doctorow
I gave a slideshow of my photos from the conference. In an unpublished photo, Rael peers at the screenm frowning. Rael theorises that he must be short sighted, as so many photos show him in this pose. Nat Torkington’s theory is that Rael just gets annoyed by sucky software, and all software sucks.
During the ensuing conversation Rael observed that Web 2.0 is about making web apps that work Right. Apps that make the leap from ‘possible to implement’ to ‘good to use’. From this viewpoint, Web 2.0 is nothing new. It’s a reclamation of something old now that we have the tools.
In the early days of desktop publishing, one would hear old hands complaining that DTP wasn’t as good as cold metal, it wasn’t as good as hot metal, hell, it wasn’t even as good as the godawful optical typesetting systems. And they were right. With early DTP tools it was almost impossible to do fine typesetting: the fonts were awful, the control was clumsy, the ‘easy’ things were hard, and the stupid things were easy.
But the toolmakers and the early adopters persevered to the point that the state of the art is as good as typesetters have ever had it. There’s still nothing quite like cold metal, and there never will be, but there was never a metal type like Zapfino Extra either.
Maybe with the Web 2.0 idea we’re seeing the beginning of the same climb that Digital Typesetting has made, from ‘convenient but clunky’ to being at least as high quality as the old way of doing things.
I certainly hope so.
I’m not knocking older web applications. Given the limits of the browser technology available to their developers, they are fantastic achievements. But the tools are so much better now. Better tools mean better products—once people have learned how to use them effectively.
Now, if you don’t mind, I’m off to read my beta copy of Pragmatic Ajax so I can start putting that theory into practice.
