Tommy Logic™

Web 2.0 for Designers

By Richard MacManus & Joshua Porter

In Web 1.0, a small number of writers created Web pages for a large number of readers. As a result, people could get information by going directly to the source: Adobe.com for graphic design issues, Microsoft.com for Windows issues, and CNN.com for news. Over time, however, more and more people started writing content in addition to reading it. This had an interesting effect—suddenly there was too much information to keep up with! We did not have enough time for everyone who wanted our attention and visiting all sites with relevant content simply wasn’t possible. As personal publishing caught on and went mainstream, it became apparent that the Web 1.0 paradigm had to change.

"The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways."

Enter Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into “microcontent” units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.

These tools, the interfaces of Web 2.0, will become the frontier of design innovation.

The evidence is already here with RSS aggregators, search engines, portals, APIs (application programming interfaces, which provide hooks to data) and Web services (where data can be accessed via XML-RPC, SOAP and other technologies). Google Maps (in beta) provides the same functionality as similar competing services but features a far superior interface. Flickr’s interface is one of the most intuitive and beloved around. Del.icio.us offers personal and social functionality, and reaches far beyond its own site. Interfaces like these are changing the way we store, access, and share information. It matters very little what domain content comes from.

Web 2.0 has often been described as “the Web as platform,” and if we think about the Web as a platform for interacting with content, we begin to see how it impacts design. Imagine a bunch of stores of content provided by different parties—companies, individuals, governments—upon which we could build interfaces that combine the information in ways no single domain ever could. For example, Amazon.com makes its database of content accessible to the outside world. Anyone can design an interface to replace Amazon’s that better suits specific needs (see Amazon Light). The power of this is that content can be personalized or remixed with other data to create much more useful tools.

There are six trends that characterize Web 2.0 for designers. In this introductory article we’ll summarize each of those trends and give brief examples. In upcoming articles we’ll explore each trend in more detail.

Writing Semantic Markup: Transition to XML

One of the biggest steps in realizing Web 2.0 is the transition to semantic markup, or markup that accurately describes the content it’s applied to. The most popular markup languages, HTML and XHTML, are used primarily for display purposes, with tags to which designers can apply styles via CSS.

These markup languages are not semantically dead, however. Designers can describe content, but only to the extent that it fits within the (X)HTML tag set. For example, designers can mark up content as headers, paragraphs, list items, citations, and definition lists using the <h1>, <p>, <li> , <cite> and <dl> tags, respectively. For some simple documents, these tags are adequate to describe content effectively. For most documents, however, there is no way to accurately describe the content with the (X)HTML tags we have available. In Web 2.0, this description is not only possible, but also critical.

Though HTML and XHTML give us only a glimpse of what it means, there is one technology demonstrating clearly the power of semantic markup. RSS is an XML format for syndicating content. It is an easy way for sites to tell people when there is new content available. So, instead of browsing to your favorite site over and over again to see if something is new, you can simply subscribe to its RSS feed by typing the RSS URI into a feed aggregator. The aggregator will periodically poll the site, notify you if something is new, and deliver that content. It’s a real timesaver.

Providing Web Services: Moving Away From Place

During the early years of the Web, before content had semantic meaning, sites were developed as a collection of “pages.” Sites in the 1990s were usually either brochure-ware (static HTML pages with insipid content) or they were interactive in a flashy, animated, JavaScript kind of way. In that era, a common method of promoting sites was to market them as “places”—the Web as a virtual world complete with online shopping malls and portals.

In the late 90s and especially the first few years of the 21st century, the advent of XML technologies and Web services began to change how sites were designed. XML technologies enabled content to be shareable and transformable between different systems, and Web services provided hooks into the innards of sites. Instead of visual design being the interface to content, Web services have become programmatic interfaces to that same content. This is truly powerful. Anyone can build an interface to content on any domain if the developers there provide a Web services API.

Two great examples of the shift away from place to services on the Web are Amazon.com and eBay, both of which provide an immense amount of commercial data in the form of Web services, accessible to any developer who wants it. An interesting interface built using eBay’s Web services is Andale, a site that tracks sales and prices to give auction sellers a better idea of what items are hot and how much they’ve been selling for.

Remixing Content: About When and What, not Who or Why

Associated Press CEO Tom Curley made an important and far-reaching keynote speech to the Online News Association Conference on Nov. 12, 2004. In it he said, “… content will be more important than its container in this next phase [of the Web]… Killer apps, such as search, RSS and video-capture software such as TiVo—to name just a few—have begun to unlock content from any vessel we try to put it in.”

Curley was specifically addressing journalists and the media industry, but this insight applies equally to the design profession. Web design during Web 1.0 was all about building compelling places (or sites) on the Web. But content can no longer be contained in a single place—at least not without going against the nature of the social Web and locking up your content in a secure site.

Web design in Web 2.0 is about building event-driven experiences, rather than sites. And it’s no coincidence that RSS is one of the key building blocks. RSS feeds enable people to subscribe to your content and read it in an aggregator any time, sans extraneous design.

Searches can also be mixed with RSS to let people subscribe to content via topic and tag RSS feeds (from PubSub or Feedster, for example). These so-called “future searches” not only let people mix content from various sources, but end up being yet another way for users to bypass a site’s visual design.

Because content flows across the Web in RSS feeds and can be remixed along the way, Web designers must now think beyond sites and figure out how to brand the content itself.