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December 20, 2005
More Top Changes in 2005
More Top Changes in 2005: Building atop the prior items, here are some more significant changes of the past year, all in my own opinion. 2005 saw the widespread acceptance of the need for both clientside and serverside interactivity -- the acceptance of the Rich Internet Application approach. This was formalized by the widespread press buzz around "AJaX" -- the ability to refresh text independently of presentation isn't a new thing for HTML browsers, so the attention paid to AJaX actually signified general acceptance of the RIA model itself, although we're all still working on aspects such as offline synch. Another trend was the emphasis on casual content -- professional video, text and music will all remain important, but decentralized production and publishing -- and efficient navigation systems! -- really blossomed in 2005, and enfranchised many more people on the internet. A third trend was the realworld acceptance of web services, whether from the whole "mashup" school or from simple XML formattings of text as RSS or the APIs being released by varied services -- the idea of decoupling data from presentation is now accepted, seen as the norm. Lots of other things happened this year, but these are the most significant trends I saw fulfilled: consumer computers were invisibly and very rapidly upgraded via Flash Player 8... RIAs and web services are now mainstream ideas... more people can create richer content than ever before.
Posted by John Dowdell at December 20, 2005 2:16 PM