Results tagged “trends”

About a decade ago, the web development industry made a decisive shift towards support for web standards. Though the effort encompassed many related efforts around HTML, CSS, the DOM and related technologies, perhaps the signature work of the movement was to encourage CSS-based layouts instead of the then-common practice of using HTML tables to design a page's visual appearance.

The campaign was extraordinarily effective, to the degree that most new sites that launch today use CSS as their primary system for styling and positioning. And the more socially inept web geeks out there still consider those who use tables for layout worthy of their derision, instead of opportunities for education. Tables have fallen so far out of favor that it's not uncommon for people to be reluctant to use them even for the presentation of tabular data.

In short, for front-end web developers, tables are definitely out of fashion.

More recently, web architects and developers have adopted a new generation of storage technologies for data, such as BigTable and SimpleDB. While these systems still use tables to store data, it's common to have a far smaller number of columns in these tables than were used in older systems. And their advantages in areas like scalability and partitioning, have encouraged lots of developers to consider adopting these new data storage systems despite their unfamiliarity.

In short, for back-end web developers, fat tables are rapidly going out of fashion.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that these technological trends are merely about geeks following what's faddish or popular amongst their peers. In fact, in both cases, the shift away from traditional tables might reflect the fact that our data has to be more nimble in both how it's stored and retrieved and in how it's presented and styled. These accommodations are necessary because the applications being built are more social and human-centric in nature, which means they have to be able to adapt and evolve as relationships and communities mature.

But part of me can't help but feel sad for the tables. I'm sorry, tables! I hope you come back in favor soon.

(Thanks to Mo for the image.)

Many years ago, when the web was a simpler place, one of the scariest monsters conjured up to describe the privacy threats that lurked on the Internet was the DoubleClick cookie, used for tying your ad-viewing behavior on the web to your real-world identity. USA Today said it was Orwellian, and set off a half-decade of worries for web surfers, many of whom didn't even have the foggiest notion what they were worried about.

Today, Google's released Google Web History. It's a brilliant, powerful, even insightful tool that will undoubtedly worry those who were concerned about privacy in the early days of the web's popularity. It doesn't help that Google now owns DoubleClick, and all those worries about cookies are amplified that Google actually stores all of this data on its computers, not yours, tied to an identity that might well also be linked to your email, office documents, your instant messages, and of course your browser history itself, courtesy of the browser toolbar.

Services For Your Web History

From a technical standpoint, Google Web History is one of those tools that's so well-executed it seems simple, or even obvious, the first time you see it. There's a basic timeline of your search history, with the ability to drill into specific search result histories for Google properties like web search, image search, news, Froogle (now renamed Google Product Search, though the UI for Web History shows the old name), Video, and Maps. There's even, astoundingly, a history of which AdSense Ads you've clicked on.

Some Google properties are missing -- Google Apps documents don't show up in your history, and the more loosely-connected services like Blogger, Reader, and Picasa are nowhere to be found. Plus, there's a peculiar disconnect with the Google Desktop Search tool's services -- the Timeline feature shared between both applications appears completely different, and your desktop history isn't integrated into the new service.

As you'd expect, there's a prominent and simple way to remove those scurrilous bits from your web history. And the improved presentation of an item as mundane as one's browser history reveals a recent strength of Google's: revealing data you already have access to. The Google Desktop Search tool on Windows made smart use of a disk indexing system that Microsoft had already built into Windows. In a similar way, the Web History service makes use of the Google Toolbar history to take old data and turn it into useful information through smart presentation.

There's a promising, but (for me, at least) still blank area titled "Interesting Items", and the reappearance of a feature that first showed up in the excellent Google Reader: Trends.

Now, Google's data for my own history is slightly skewed; I tend to use Blingo for a lot of basic searches on my computers, and Google's toolbar doesn't track that. But the fundamental underpinnings for a remarkably deep look into behavior on the web are already present.

The Real World

Outside of the world of users who gawk at every shiny new thing on the web, though, this is going to give people the heebie-jeebies in a way that we're probably only used to getting from Microsoft. In fact, it's probably safe to say that no other major web company could release this product today; The backlash from the user community of players like Microsoft, Yahoo, or AOL would simply be too strong.

Google is still in a period where most users on the web feel they are a relatively benevolent company. And it helps that the new product is excellent, useful, and unique. But with the release of Web History, especially in the context of its recent acquisitions and announcements, Google may have crossed the line where regular users start to react with skepticism and caution instead of unabashed enthusiasm.

This product is all about web history. We've already learned some lessons from the history of the web about what happens to companies once users start to question their trust in the intentions or implications of new products. It may serve Google well to revisit those lessons.

Some Links

Here are a few useful links to add to your own web history:

• Eight years ago, concerns about privacy in a billion-dollar DoubleClick deal. A related story from the period in USA Today, as well as a contemporary warning from a privacy advocacy group.
• A comprehensive overview of Google Web History from Search Engine Land.
• Google's first mistake, which was a fairly naive post I wrote four years ago, back before it was as clear to outsiders how important AdWords and AdSense would be to Google. I think it was most useful in the context of refuting some understandably hyperbolic observations such as Google are building the Memex. Jason Kottke also chimed in with Google is not a search company a few weeks later.
• Fred Wilson's skepticism over Google's recent direction, in the context of their acquisition of DoubleClick and YouTube, as well as the departure of Dodgeball's founders.
• And finally, Blingo, to whom I trade my search history in exchange for intermittent prizes which mostly consist of free movie tickets. Seems fair to me.

As part of my continuing quest to create as many posts as possible with as little original content as possible, let's take another look at my revisitation of my own earlier post on web dev trends for 2006. This time, it's in the form of an interview on devpapers.com:

Q: With the rise of code generators and powerful application developer tools, it seems we are all developers now. What do you think of that approach?

A:I think the democratization of tools is almost always a good thing.

The best, least predictable innovations often come from people outside a discipline. And people who have a really unique contribution to make will never be threatened by the masses of amateurs who are just trying to scratch an itch.

There's some other good questions in the article, including "[W]hat do you think you would have said differently if you were to predict web development trends for the next 5 years?". I'll apologize in advance for all the horrible ad cruft on that site, though I don't have any control over that. If I can find a cleaner link to the article, I'll post that.

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post called Web Development Trends for 2006. It was designed to be a forward-thinking view, not just at what technologies would be hot this year, but which ones would be the most valuable addition to the toolkit of a working web developer.

It's been a year, so it's time to revisit. I'll describe how that particular area has evolved, and whether it was a good call or a bad call to focus on that area of expertise.

• Dampening: Also called damping, I described this as "the softening of a user interface through gradual transition instead of immediate state changes". What was considered fairly new then is pretty much standard practice now. I wasn't explicit about how to take advantage of the opportunity, but it seems today that the hard part isn't creating the effects: Components such as the Prototype framework and the Scriptaculous library simplify the development process. The challenge is in identifying how and when to make good use of the technique. Verdict: Good call. Experts in this area are even more valuable than they were a year ago.

• E4X: As I defined it last year, "[s]mart, sensible handling of XML in Javascript" for users of Firefox or Flash. It's a great, powerful technology, but it just hasn't taken off, particularly because its client platforms still don't include native support in Internet Explorer or Safari. Verdict: Bad call. It's still worth hoping it comes alive in the future.

• JSON: JavaScript Object Notation is the cat's pajamas when it comes to exchanging data in a lightweight manner. I had some concerns that people would see JSON as competing with XML as a format, but they turned out to be unfounded. JSON has taken off for many APIs, including a complete developer center from Yahoo, which covers the JSON APIs available for Yahoo services like del.icio.us, Search, Travel, Answerss and nearly every other Yahoo service. It's also shown up in places like the AOL Pictures API and on Eventful. Our team at Six Apart has used it extensively to power Vox, and Tatsuhiko Miyagawa also built it into his Plagger platform. This one's a gimme. Verdict: Good call. JSON skills are a must-have for serious Ajax hackers.

• Good ole' XHTML and CSS: Okay, I cheated on this one. But it was mostly serving as a reminder that you can't forget the basics. Verdict: Always a good call.

• Buffering: The idea here is that the big gobs of Javascript that power Ajax apps would require accommodations for the time they take to load. Techniques like pipelining and intelligent caching have helped mitigate this need somewhat, but there are still valid concerns about the user experience and performance challenges involved in creating rich applications. Verdict: Still out. Can't hurt to be up to speed here, but it's not a deal-breaker if you aren't an expert yet.

• The Atom API: The potential for building on top of robust API for data storage is enormous. We've seen some fits and starts and progress here, but the Atom API hasn't gotten finalized in the way that feed format did, and that has somewhat affected adoption. On the other hand, we've seen some ringing endorsements: Dewitt Clinton, former principal engineer at Amazon's A9, said, "I’ve found the Atom 1.0 standard to meet the needs of nearly every single problem that I’ve thrown at it." Google's Data APIs for Calendar, Blogger and Base are built on top of the API as well. For general data exchange, the Atom API is strong. For regular posting to blogs, the lack of finalization has meant that Atom will probably show up somewhat later in new tools using blogging APIs, such as Microsoft's Word 2007 and Windows Live Writer, or Adobe's Contribute. Verdict: A (moderately) good call.

• Helping Ruby Grow Up: There's been a lot of progress in this area. A year ago, internationalization and localization on the Rails platform could be painful, but updates to both the core platform and to the applications running on top of it have simplified this work. Best of all, there's a smart, defined path for scalability on Rails applications. As DHH himself recommends, just use LiveJournal's open source infrastructure. memcached is free, recently-updated, and works like crazy. So the immediate need was met by people who saw the value of this opportunity last year, but now there's new issues to tackle. Verdict: Good call.

• Marketing: Another gimme. It never goes out of style, and it's still underrated by most geeks. Learn it, live it, love it. Verdict: Always a good call.

The Bottom Line

So overall, how'd we do? Out of eight predictions, we've got two items that are always a good call, which don't really count as particularly prescient. The verdict is still out on one. One was a bad call, and four were good calls. If you throw out the two that don't count, that's four predictions out of six, with one that could still be valuable in the future. That's a 2/3 chance you would have learned something useful by gambling on those recommendations a year ago.

I'm still working on some new recommendations, but I'm more than willing to hear feedback on my analyses above, especially if you disagree. Thanks to Doug van der Molen for the reminder to revisit.

Curious about what technologies and techniques are going to be popular in the coming months and into the next year? Well, our crack team of editors here at dashes.com (that is to say, me) have assembled a list of up-and-coming trends that you should keep an eye on. Call it vocational education for people building Web 2.0.

Some of the overall areas of focus are integration (as always) and front-end technologies that have highly visible impacts on end user experience. People won't pay for a service or rely on it if it doesn't have a robust back-end infrastructure, but they'll be happy to pay for it if the front-end is attractive and at least seems usable.

Here, then, is a random assortment of new web development trends to be ready for in 2006.

• Dampening:

These technologies go by a lot of names, but in general, dampening is the softening of a user interface through gradual transition instead of immediate state changes. The demand for dampening reflects the front-end focus that is being rediscovered in web applications, but it can require server-side changes in order to enable some effects. The best-marketed example of dampening is the yellow fade technique, but overall, user interface elements will be sliding and collapsing instead of simply disappearing.

Key influences on the user experience here are things like the iPod screen backlight fading out instead of merely shutting off, or soft-close doors on newer automobiles.

• E4X:

This little-known ECMA standard is short for "ECMAscript for XML". That mouthful succinctly describes a powerful concept: Smart, sensible handling of XML in Javascript. Right now, the J and the X in Ajax don't play well together, or at least not as well as they should. E4X promises to smooth that combination, at least in more modern/capable user agents. Support is already present, or will soon be, in both the Flash player and Firefox.

What's the quick synopsis? How 'bout building a form dynamically by doing this:

var html = <html/>;
html.head.title = "Hello, World.";
html.body.form.@name = "hello";
html.body.form.@action = "test.php";
html.body.form.@method = "post";
html.body.form.@onclick = "return foo();";
html.body.form.input[0] = "";
html.body.form.input[0].@name = "Submit";