Head over to ecirkit.com and click the Oh-So-2.0 single-word “Learn” header. You read:
No Refreshing
No Page Jumping
No Annoying Ads
No Nonsense
The Real Web 2.0eCirkit is a constantly-evolving web-based application that employs the latest, most innovative technologies to make the user experience as dynamic and stimulating as the internet will allow. While its functionality is constantly pushing the envelope, eCirkit still retains older, practical methodologies (e-mail, videos, etc.) but delivers them in a means that is quicker and smarter than the most commonly-used “social networking” sites.
Yes, but…
They should add ‘No linking directly to pages on our website.’
Try clicking on “Learn more”.
My favourite is the “totally gnarly” calendar that does everything. “Dragon Drop!” Besides all that jazz, the fact that the whole “learn” section doesn’t have a back button doesn’t fill me with confidence.
I’m amused that the oh-so-2.0 “Learn” is presented using an oh-so-1998 .png, with no alt or longdesc attributes.
“Want to Learn? Only if you’ve got 20/20 vision”
And it’s a good job that they’re serving their strict XHTML 1.0 as text/html, since validator.w3.org thinks there’s 276 errors (not to mention the charset mismatch between the http and html meta headers).
And it’s nice to see that table-based layouts are alive and well (but that’s just me being snotty and not an actual criticism).
Table based layouts are easily a valid criticism in today’s web climate. What’s disturbing is that people still get paid for them.
I love how, once again, webmasters are starting to use visible warnings that they don’t have a clue what they’re doing.
For example, the “Powered by AJAX” button tells us that not only does their site not work for the majority of web users, but that their primary excuse for this shameful lack of foresight is the use of a term that means nothing to said end-users. Good job on that one!
“Trend” pages with no actual content have been around within a hair’s breadth of as long as the web. Before “Web 2.0” and AJAX it was Flash, and before that there were other exciting new technologies: Flash, Javascript, Java, plugins in general, frames (*wow* they really got excited about frames), using neon colors against a black background, being best viewed with Netscape (which I think originally meant they used BGCOLOR and so forth) and before that Mosaic (not sure what that meant, maybe they used img elements), custom bullet and horizontal rule images (there were many, many sites devoted entirely to collecting these), belonging to web rings, …
When something new comes along and snaps up the interest of the trend-followers, then “Web 2.0” and AJAX will have to stand on their merits. AJAX (in the sense of asynchronously retrieving information and inserting it, without reloading the whole page) is certainly useful enough to stand on its merits.
As for “Web 2.0”, I have never really understood how it differs from the world wide web in general. Supposedly it’s about user-created content, but that’s what the web has been about since 1994 at least. A blog is marginally more convenient than updating your home page regularly, but it’s not a fundamentally different idea. Reader comments are at least as old as the “Guestbook” trend. There’s syndication, I suppose, but 99% of people who have and read blogs don’t actually *use* it. This is not to say that Web 2.0 represents a bad or meaningless concept: I’m only saying it’s not a *new* concept; only the term is new.