Beyond Web 2.0

On the desk­top there are a lot of inter­est­ing things going on: res­o­lu­tion inde­pen­dent UI’s, better web ser­vices inte­gra­tion, branded appli­ca­tions instead of HIG com­pli­ance and the evo­lu­tion­ary process of using the GPU (Graph­i­cal Pro­cess­ing Unit) for the desk­top (3D user inter­faces, audio and AI) trans­form­ing the GPU in a MPU (Media Pro­cess­ing Unit).
The future devel­op­ment of the Web is a whole other story, even though there’s a lot of inter­est­ing stuff going on: from mis­used and mis­un­der­standed buzz words like Web 2.0 and AJAX to using Second Life as a mar­ket­ing tool. The evo­lu­tion­ary progress of the Web is a whole lot slower, dare I say almost none!? When we get decent plat­form inde­pen­dent web appli­ca­tions (RIA’s), busi­ness as we know it will change!
The Web User Expe­ri­ence hasn’t changed that much over the past years! At Bright Alley, the com­pany I’m cur­rently work­ing for, we’re cur­rently devel­op­ing a new breed of User Expe­ri­ence: loosely based on SiSoMo (Sight, Sound, Motion), from Saatchi & Saatchi, fill­ing in the blanks and miss­ing pieces.
On the Web a lot of chal­lenges have to be over­come first: res­o­lu­tion and plat­form inde­pen­dent inter­faces by using Flash or SVG (Scal­able Vector Graph­ics), the latter, Adobe has decided to dis­con­tinue sup­port for Adobe SVG Viewer start­ing from Jan­u­ary 1, 2008 (End of Life). They even plan to remove Adobe SVG Viewer from the Adobe.com down­load area on Jan­u­ary 1, 2009, and redis­tri­b­u­tion by third par­ties is not allowed by the license. This devel­op­ment is not sur­pris­ing after their acqui­si­tion of Macro­me­dia, and there is hope that by the time Adobe SVG Viewer is dis­con­tin­ued there will be mature alter­na­tives for all the Inter­net Explorer users. Dumb move Adobe!
The weird part is that all browser devel­op­ers (except one) are begin­ning to sup­port SVG. SVG is a far more flex­i­ble and intu­itive format then pro­pri­etary Adobe Flash bina­ries. SVG Basic and SVG Tiny are even part of 3GPP. So why jabber so much about SVG instead of Flash? First of all SVG is XML based, it’s not owned by one com­pany and it’s an open stan­dard (no licenses and plu­g­ins). SMIL (pro­nounced smile) also XML based is already part of MPEG-7, so it’s no effort to include SVG as default Vector Graphic layer in MPEG-21.
For the Web SVG RCC (Ren­der­ing Custom Con­tent) + XForms could be the secret ingre­di­ent “X” for cre­at­ing wider adap­tion. Who knows? As Alan Kay so ele­gantly puts it: “The best way to pre­dict the future is to invent it”!