The Stairwell

While Hilary Clinton complains that she gets all the hard questions, the country's top technology CEO's continue to be pelted by one hard question at most of their public appearances: What is Web 3.0 going to be? Tim Berners-Lee has offered that Web 3.0 is going to be all about the Semantic Web (or a web based on markup code like RDF or OWL that can be read by machines, not just people, allowing machines to deduce and infer what data is important and share it in real time). Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, stated that he believed Web 3.0 would be defined by applications (api's) that are distributed virally and that work universally with the 'cloud' of data that is retrievable from anywhere. Jerry Yang, found of Yahoo!, sees a Web 3.0 where consumers will create software that services their needs and the division between software producers and consumers will blur.

These visions of a future web have their critics, and many of the models they have talked about over the last several years have failed to materialize in any broad way, but several notable instances of their feasibility are well documented.

My favorite summation of what Web 3.0 might be in the next decade comes from Nova Spivack, founder of Radar Networks, who defines Web 3.0 as the third decade of the Web (2010–2020) during which he suggests several major complementary technology trends will reach new levels of maturity simultaneously, including:

* transformation of the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole.

* ubiquitous connectivity, broadband adoption, mobile Internet access and mobile devices;

* network computing, software-as-a-service business models, Web services interoperability, distributed computing, grid computing and cloud computing;

* open technologies, open APIs and protocols, open data formats, open-source software platforms and open data (e.g. Creative Commons, Open Data License);

* open identity, OpenID, open reputation, roaming portable identity and personal data;

* the intelligent web, Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, GRDDL, semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores;

* distributed databases, the "World Wide Database" (enabled by Semantic Web technologies); and

* intelligent applications, natural language processing.[13], machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents

What effect this third decade of the web will have on interface design / engineering will be a topic for next week...

The iPhone - and even its competitors - has catapulted public expectations for rich media experiences on mobile devices. A promise in the words of one iPhone commercial aired recently: "The internet...the real internet."

Well, if that's the case (and the jury is still out on this claim), then web developers will be spending more time learning the available languages necessary to create rich content for mobile devices and cell phones of all stripes and sizes. Adobe has been working on Flash Lite and has been creating developer tools for mobile devices for the last few years. Now they're offering Flash Lite tools and tutorials to a wider audience of web developers than ever before.

Among some helpful links that can help anyone get started developing content for these platforms, are these:

a blog by Bill Perry, an evangelist for mobile and devices at Adobe who is currently traveling in Asia to promote the technology and train new content developers.

Sony Ericson mobile phone site

blog of Mark Doherty, Adobe's Developer Evangelist in EMEA for mobile

And of course, the Adobe Developer site itself, which includes a great 'Community' area where some of the better known names (and their ideas) in this area are available.

Before diving in head-first however, understand that Flash Lite may only be a bridge to standardize performance across different computing and hand-held devices until all devices will possess the capability to run Flash 9 or higher without modifications. If you're in a hurry, use Flash Lite now. But a year or two down the road, you may be able to leave it aside and use Flash X (or Flex) exclusively.

W3Schools pubishes a great up-to-the-month browser market share statistics table for anyone interested in testing their sites across multiple browsers.

It's a great place otherwise to brush up on your standards and code tricks. Happy reading.

In their words: "At W3Schools you will find all the Web-building tutorials you need, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Database, Multimedia and WAP."

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Clients have asked us in the past - what latest coding and design principles drive your redesign work? So here are a few that often apply regardless of vertical.

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BD, along with ISGFL, has delivered to one of our clients, a fully dynamic FAQ area for their site.

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Some AJAX sites that provide on-the-fly interactivity:

www.start.com
www.netvibes.com
digg spy

Thanks to Joe Hewitt for writing this free page debugger for Firefox. It's quite useful for testing everything in the dom (HTML, CSS, AJAX, Javascript, etc.).

http://www.joehewitt.com/software/firebug/

The means by which your audience can visit your site are expanding. Internet browsers, television, and now even cell phones. But if your firm's web site is standards compliant today, you can relax. If not, read on...

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