Web 3.0? In Dayton?
The Greater Dayton IT Alliance is announcing web 3.0. Which is great and dandy- considering so many businesses in Dayton still aren’t web 2.0 or even web 1.0.
Dr. Sheth got a great write up on semantic web research in Sunday’s Dayton Daily News. Regular readers of Websitetology- may recall us pointing to an interesting search engine called Kartoo – http://blogosopher.com/?p=62 a social network mapping tool- which does some of the same things that Dr. Sheth’s semantic search research is focused on.
While I’m sure Dr. Sheth is a bright guy- the reality is- most people who are the leaders in the search field are already working for Google. They have the money, they have the technology- and – most importantly- they have the users already contributing the intelligence of the masses to refine the data.
But- here is what the GDITA says about the luncheon:
Come see Web 3.0, the future of the web. Dr. Amit Sheth, the the LexisNexis Eminent Scholar for Advanced Data Management and Analysis at Wright State University, DaytaOhio, will be presenting his research on advanced web technology. The presentation will look at future technology and include how local companies (big and small) can partner with the excellent research being done at Wright State University.
This event is for people interested in how they can incorporate advanced web technologies into their business offerings.
Dr. Sheth has held research and development, management and faculty positions at Honeywell, Unisys, Bellcore and the University of Georgia, where he founded the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems Laboratory (LSDIS). Dr. Sheth has founded two start ups and published more than 200 papers and articles and authored/edited four books. He has organized eight international meetings and holds two patents. He earned his Ph.D. in computer and information science at The Ohio State University.
One note: The GDITA site breaks Firefox on the Mac. Good web developers test their site in all relevant environments- Window, Mac, Linux – with IE, Firefox, Safari etc.
This reply is related to the ending comment regarding GDITA’s lack of cross-browser compatibility. For the record, I don’t know how much weight your opinion carries considering this blog’s lack of XHTML compliancy. However, I do agree that websites should be accessible and usable from a variety of systems. Unfortunately, you reach a point of diminishing returns spending additional development time catering to 2% of the browsing population. This is especially true when you are a non-profit, and have little money to devote to a revenue-generating website. 🙂
Chris, I have to agree with you. All too many times clients skimp out on cross browser testing.
I’m sorry, Chris, I’m going to disagree with you. Cross-browser (and cross-platform) testing is far more important than a site that validates as XHTML. HTML vs. XHTML aside, I will say that validation is important, but that a site that works across multiple platforms is far more so.
For further reading, I’d like to direct you to Mike Davidson’s piece “March to Your Own Standard,” in particular, the list in which he says “Just because you can validate your code doesn’t mean you are better than anybody else.”
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/06/march-to-your-own-standard
Interesting! I happened to read up Sramana Mitra’s definition of Web 3.0. Please read this: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS). And for a series of examples, you can see her analysis of the Personal Finance category from a Web 3.0 perspective.
Will,
If you are familiar with Mike Davidson, then you’ve probably heard of Shaun Inman. Inman’s “Mint” application was originally developed to work primarily with non-IE browsers. As you probably know, Shaun Inman is one of the most respected designer/developers in the world, yet he decided to completely orphan the most widely used browser. Does this mean that he’s not a “good web developer?”
Please don’t misunderstand my point– I’m not saying that standards compliancy takes precedence over cross-platform compatibility. I agree that reaching the largest audience is paramount. However, project constraints, such as time and money, will ultimately determine the audience.
Chris- another option is to use a open source CMS that won’t bork your code.
Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, WordPress, Jaws etc.
Also makes development go faster.
That site works fine on my Mac in both Safari and Firefox.
And there is a really weird anomoly in the upper right corner of this page in IE7 (hover over the black Websitology square, and see the text below it).
Browser compatability and XHTML compliance are both important, but I think that thier level importance varies depending on the project. I agree that catering to 2% of browsers can be trivial on a site that gets 10,000 uniques/mo. On a site that is getting 2,000,000 uniques a month, then 2% of the visitors is a lot more important and will be well worth the extra investment.
CMS’s and site building frameworks are ok for some projects, but in my experience they are by no means one-size-fits-all. Often the development effort to customize them is larger than writing from scratch, or the performance is so poor that using them on a high-traffic site is not an option.