Came across two great articles today that nicely summarize recent web development and design trends.
Marc Hedlund from O'Reilly wrote a post entitled Web Development 2.0. Despite the YA2.0N title (Yet Another 2.0 Name, pronounced "YAWN"), the article is a useful overview of software development practices that Marc has been seeing in the current era of Web startups.
This extract is quite ironic -- and Marc agrees with me:
"Ship timestamps, not versions: Gone are the days of 1.0, 1.1, and 1.3.17b6. They have been replaced by the '20060210-1808:32 push'. For nearly all of these companies, a version number above 1.0 just isn't meaningful any more. If you are making revisions to your site and pushing them live, then doing it again a half hour later, what does a version number really mean?"
Another great post is The Agile Web Design Manifesto, by Emily Chang and Max Kiesler of Ideacodes. They have come up with some core principles for this:
- Design the system not the surface
- Design as evolutionary and user-driven
- There is no page, only pathways
- Rapid and iterative over final
- Simplicity over complexity
- Collaborative and open design
The first and third principles - 'Design the system not the surface' and 'There is no page, only pathways' - are especially relevant to me right now. I'm currently writing a chapter about my Design for Data theory, in the O'Reilly book I'm co-writing with Josh Porter, and it's very much about going beyond the Page metaphor on the Web. More on that soon, because I have a feeling I'm going to need feedback on this chapter from my blog readers...
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Heh, I've gotten a lot of grief for merging that article into the "2.0" lane of the highway. Oh, well. It's notable to me that nearly all of the companies I'm referring to in the article refer very explicitly to Web 2.0 to describe themselves.
Like all trend labels, this too shall pass. But I don't regret the YAWN title -- I'll be interested to see which of the practices I catalogued also pass during the next trend, and which remained.
Glad you liked the article, after the title!
Posted by: Marc Hedlund | February 11, 2006 7:55 PM
I like the timestamp idea for version/revision numbers. Good post.
Posted by: Noah Winecoff | February 15, 2006 7:20 AM