The changing face of the web
I’m in the process of moving over to a new development laptop – it’s only taken a year to get round to it, but that’s another story to do with IE6 & Vista/XP support. As part of this is tidying up over 5 years of accumulated IE favourites, some of which were inherited from a previous desktop.
It’s a journey through the ever changing face of the internet – old and redundant sites, broken links from reworked site structures & layouts, a history of scripting languages and browser standards, the changing trends in web design, e-commerce, and web development, and some links I wonder just why I even though about saving!
Some interesting trends have stood out:
- The rise of the CMS – which will be written about in another article, but is encapsulated by Wordpress & Joomla in open-source, and products like Expression Engine in the commercial sectors. Web Apps have come a long way in a few years
- The maturing of new scripting languages, the rise of new ones, and the deprecation of old ones. Rising to the top are PHP5 (and especially php5.2+), RubyOnRails, OOP design patterns in Web Apps, ASP.NET, and the fall from favour of CGI, asp, and somewhat, perl.
- Web2.0 rears it’s head with a preponderance of BIG letters and background images that characterize the genre. The general sprinkling of css gallery sites such as cssmania.com also are a thing of the last few years. Speaking of Web2.0 – big graphics are in and fancy web apps to automate production abound such as stripe generator, tabs generator,
and freshgenerator.com -web2.0 boxes and graphics generator - The increase in sites starting with seo – seowotsit, seogetmeupthere, seomoneymaker etc. No one can doubt the increasing importance of SEO in todays internet, especially where making money over spending money is such an increasing importance.
All in all it’s a mixture of evolution and revolution and characterises the changing face of the web. No doubt there’s more to come…
