Friday, August 1st, 2008
Open Web 0.4: Composability, Interop, Ubiquity, and the Client
Category: Editorial
Brad Neuberg got a huge amount of feedback on his call for a definition of the Open Web. He distilled that information and tried hard to come up with something that fits into one sentence, and ended up with this:
The Open Web is an interoperable, ubiquitous, and searchable network where everyone can share information, integrate, and innovate without having to ask for permission, accessible through a powerful and universal client.
His litmus test for this asks if the technology in question has:
- Composability The ability to innovate, link, contribute, search, and integrate without red tape, fear of a lawsuit, or having to ask “please?”
- Interoperability The ability for developers to interoperate without having to know of each others existence
- Ubiquity The ubiquity of a set of open technologies and services agreed upon by the widest possible community
- Universal Client Empowering and evolving the browser and web technologies as a universal client
3.5 rating from 23 votes
It’s interesting that developer’s are working hard to make the web more open while governments and corporations aew working just as hard to close it up. Then there is browser support…sigh…will we ever really have the Open Web?
That’s all pretty abstract, and I think the abstractions are just a best-fit around the issues web developers argue about.
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To me, the actual arguments are much more interesting than any abstractions that fall out.
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Issues like:
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1) If JavaScript was allowed by browsers to be supplied in a tokenized state (minus the source), is the Open Web effectively gone?
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2) Are Flash and Silverlight keeping browsers from going where they should go (example: native Canvas support for IE)?
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3) Is machine-generated code (from compilers for Java, Ruy, HAXE, etc.) a danger to the Open web because the code is inscrutable?
Hurray censorship!
>>Hurray censorship!
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Wut?
Great list, of course way too general for average Joe to be able to understand what it actually says, but for a list like this to exist more than 5 years I think it should be extremely general. The bright ones among us can always explain what it means to the rest I assume ;)
Sure. It’s general enough it can mean almost anything.