Tim Bray On the Future of the Web

snitch writes "In a recent interview at QCon SF 2008, Tim Bray talks about why he is not convinced with the buzz surrounding Rich Internet Applications and shares his ideas on Cloud Computing. He also expresses his opinion regarding the debate REST vs. WS-* and the future directions web technologies will be taking. Bray also addresses the way web technologies are affected by the current economic turmoil and gives his insight into which paradigms he sees going forward in these challenging times."

Comments

I think he has some good points.

[rackserverdeals]

What he says about RIA might be controversial but there is some validity to what he says. There is a lot to be said for simplicity of interface and richness of content. That has been the hallmark of most great websites.

That's not to say user interfaces couldn't be improved on the web through technologies such as AJAX, but I feel it should be used more as a condiment rather than the main course.

I remember back in the 90's people kept saying "push" technologies will be the next big thing but that didn't seem to be the case.

By the way, there was a cool presentation of the Sun Cloud at CommunityOne last week. It's pretty neat. I think that cloud computing should still abstract scaling from the user, but that may never happen or will take a lot longer to implement.

Right now it's just like drawing a network diagram in Visio, except the symbols in your drawing represent actual virtual servers in the Sun Cloud. It's pretty neat. It will be interesting to see what the pricing will be like. They say they are planning on being price competitive with other platforms, which should mean it should be similar with Amazon's EC2???

Re:I think he has some good points.

[__aasqbs9791]

I'm glad you posted that link, there are some interesting things in the second chapter.

I had lunch with Tim Bray at RailsConf 2007 one day by chance and he's one of the more personable geeks I've had that chance to meet. He has some interesting ideas, and I think he has a good grasp on the way things are likely to actually pan out in the next few years.

Re:I think he has some good points.

[bonch]

The thing that bugs me about the new web application push is that we spent 30 years creating operating systems with standard application APIs, and now everyone is trying to throw that work out and start totally from scratch for every website. It's an odd idea to run an operating system to run a application to run an application.

Re:Thanks for the text

[bcrowell]

You really did prove Bray's point--that content often trumps form.

It's actually kind of hilarious to go back and read the contents of what Bray said and compare it with the way they presented the interview on the web site. There's this, for instance:

I can remember like yesterday content management conference that was held sometimes in the middle late nineties and it was a woman from a large manufacturing company talking about the content management for the technical documentation, which was a pretty big project, and she said "Oh it was so great when the vendors all brought in the web interfaces because it forced them to get rid of all these weird cascading menus and options that nobody ever used, and brutally simplified everything down" and at the end of the day the interface the browser presents is something that people are comfortable with.

[Sites like Wikipedia] expose you to lots of deep high quality content and allow you to communicate with interesting people and I think a dollar with that kind of richness is worth a thousand dollars of things that wiggle when you put the mouse over them

It really sounds like Bray saw how they presented the interview on their site, hopped in his time machine, went back in time for the interview, and explained to them exactly how not to present it -- and then they blithely ignored the content of what he was saying and did it the way he was telling them would suck. Either that or infoq.com has an extremely well developed sense of irony.