Concept 2.0

In my August 14 "The widget network is still an open market" I talked about the lack of widget sites on the internet. Well, they are coming. Widgetbox.com has just launched though interestingly has gone for a selling premium widgets over an advertising business model.

Now that Adobe has taken over Macromedia and started working on converting Flash to Flex they are pushing it as the next generation media format that is just better than AJAX. They want content publishers building their entire systems on it.

However, I don't think it's the way to go. Flash is great for doing things like streaming videos and adverts and other interactive tools but building entire systems? AJAX is much better at that. Compatability is the obvious issue - a lot of computers don't have Flash. None of the computers in my school at university do. But aside from that, there are plenty of other issues.

The bottom line is, Flash is still proprietary. Adobe still competely control it's development, what platforms it will work on, how the language works, etc. HTML, XML, etc don't really belong to anyone. Sure they are standardised by the W3C but they don't own it as Adobe owns Flash.

Secondly, Flash is still just an embedded element. And browsers aren't good at dealing with them, they aren't supposed to be. Browsers were designed for browsing HTML. If you have a Flash object you can't select and copy text at free will, you can't right click on the page or an image and get the sub-menu you want, all you get is the Flash menu.

Finally, Flex development is expensive. You have to buy the big expensive studio to build applications on the Flex platform. You can code an entire AJAX project in a text editor. You also don't have the bother with publishing the application, you can just open it in your browser. Any text editor, any browser (well almost), any platform and you're good to go, Flex is a much more restricted process.

One of the other things I picked up on while watching Techcrunch's recent Web 2.0 documentary was the idea of what browser you code for. One of the most recent trends is for the new Web 2.0 start-ups to go back to coding for Internet Explorer (and then making it work in Firefox) rather than coding for Firefox and making it work in Internet Explorer which has generally been the done thing since we all moved to Firefox.

It makes sense. Internet Explorer is still holding a 75% market share and this would well be increased once Internet Explorer 7 is released. We can write standards compliant code all we want, the fact is that this is simply the W3C standard. The standard of the internet is still Internet Explorer, by a long way.

There are still reasons to code for Firefox. It's nice to be standards compliant so eventually all browsers can standardise. I also hate my sites looking wrong in my own browser but then that isn't really something you can consider when you are working on a big site as one person doesn't make up a large enough market share (no matter how much time you spend on it :p).

End result is though, Internet Explorer is here to stay at least for the near future and your users are using it on-mass.

Techcrunch recently published a video entitled "Web 2.0: The 24 Minute Documentary" which was a video consisting of a group of CEOs from start-ups talking about web 2.0 and answering the questions...

# What is Web 2.0?
# Are we in a bubble?
# What are the business models that will work on the web today?
# What is the role of publishers in a user generated world?
# How important and how big is the early adopter crowd?

I think these are great discussion topics and as some of you may notice, I've already blogged my own thoughts on some of these topics. It's interesting to hear what some of the people that have shaped it think about the subject.

Most of the Web 2.0 start-ups are launching widgets for MySpace and other social networks because of the power these networks have to reach a lot of people. But so far it's just companies offering what they already offer in widget form.

So far there isn't much in the way of start-ups designed around the idea of offering a variety of widgets. Is it just me or is that a a major business opportunity?

I can understand why people wouldn't want to base a large business plan around it. After all it's leaching off other businesses. Photobucket and to a lesser extent YouTube do this but then YouTube is very much free standing, more so than it's widgets and Photobucket isn't going to die if the social networking trend does.

It still has a lot of potential though. After all, the  social networking scene isn't likely to go away any time soon. It's changed a lot recently but widgets can easily be transfered across sites as people move around between Friendster, MySpace, Bebo, etc.

And it's not like the whole social networking thing started with Friendster either. It combined it with Web 2.0 perhaps but Yahoo and MSN have long had profiles plus people can always use widgets on personal web pages and blogs.

AJAX is awesome, I love it. I know not everyone does but it's been a major part of Web 2.0 projects the world over and does make things a lot faster and easier. But it's not without it's flaws and there are certain situations in which it isn't the answer.

The problem is that AJAX can often suffer from the same problems that frames suffer from. If you are constantly reloading a page without reloading a page then users cannot a) bookmark a page and b) send a link to their friends. The same problem applies for search engines indexing your content.

Therefore if you are dynamically loading real content into the page you need to consider the implications. If you're taking the approach that the web development community did for frames then you can just avoid using it. It's actually not a bad tactic. It doesn't hurt to have articles on different pages even if it does mean some reloading - most of your styling should be in cachable stylesheets anyway.

The other approach is to provide a "bookmark this page" type link that Google Maps offer. This means that you can use the dynamic power of AJAX to do all the clever stuff on your site but has the downside that if a user wants a fixed URL they have to click a link and reload the page. So it's probably worth some time considering and maybe even researching how users use your site in respect to this.

Complete with valid HTML and a URL reachable by the rest of the world! Welcome to the Concept 2.0 blog. We've already been posting so it's well worth reading through the archives as we've used up all our insight by this point ;).

Well, the Internet Explorer fixing is almost done. While the site doesn't look completely identical in IE, the problems are very small ones. I think the biggest issue is that the border for the bottom copyright notice and RSS links is missing in IE and other than that there are just a few issues of different padding and margins on the list so trivial stuff.

Next step, make the code valid. Once that's done we are ready to go!

We were almost ready to go live when I opened the blog in Internet Explorer to get a full screen screenshot from my laptop. Big mistake. Well probably not, it did need testing on Internet Explorer as you can't ignore a browser that is used by three quarters of the market. But we ran into some major problems none the less.

Namely, lists. IE likes to add a lot of random and different margins and padding. It's not even consistent, some of what is in Firefox isn't in Internet Explorer and yet IE also adds loads of other random ones. It was so bad that our third column was actually below the second column rather than at the side of it.

Now I've got it down to two issues, that I have spotted away. The headers are too big which is always a problem between IE and Firefox and also I have one more list issue to battle - IE doesn't give any space at the top of a list item whereas Firefox does and let IE gives lots of space below it and Firefox doesn't. A bit of CSS tweaking should fix that.

Of course it's highly possible that the list issues have been caused by my own CSS as well.

While reading over the Web 2.0 Explorer blog over on ZDNet recently I came across a blog post by Tara Hunt on her blog entitled R.I.P. browsers laying out the case for the death of web browsers.

While Richard McManus makes some good counterpoints on ZDNet, I think Tara is to a large extent correct in the points she puts - most Web 2.0 applications are replicating the function we already have on our desktops so if we already have the functionality on our desktops, why not just connect these apps to the internet rather than re-building them entirely.