Wicked Strategery

I've seen a lot of growth in just the last year alone in the area of web development. There have been quite a few releases of AJAX and JavaScript toolkits/frameworks/libraries, design guides and tips/tricks.

The general trend behind all of this has been to make a cleaner, more desktop-like interface on a website and to make implementing this easy for the developer. There has been a lot of discussion on simple, clean layouts; almost as if the web is going minimalist. Complex functionality should degrade gracefully in non-supported browsers so that the same content is still useful even if limited in feature spec. The whole idea of "less is more" seems to coming up.

For example, notice Google's homepage. Rather spartan and clean, and is one of the most visited sites on the internet. One doesn't encounter their large, feature-rich content until one authenticates to a premium service such as GMail or Google Analytics. Even there, the interface is straightforward and easy to use. Even to developers, GMail is easy to hook into, just look at all the Greasemonkey scripts available for enhancing the interface. While those scripts may add bloat, it is the user's decision to have them, not a mandate of the system itself.

Perhaps the most prominent trend has been the proliferation of API's. Many are making use of the REST API style, making it easy for developers (especially those using AJAX) to tie in and deliver content. Also makes it easy to tie in with Firefox extensions for a seamless browsing experience.

One trend that hasn't taken off quite like I thought it would is RSS. While all the major blogging sites provide them, a survey conducted by Yahoo! and Ipsos reported that only 4% of Internet users actively use and know they use RSS feeds. This is even in spite of the proliferation of live/customizable homepages such as Windows Live or Google Personalized Homepage.

Finally, the trend that excites me the most is the movement towards a "modular" internet. Specialized services are cropping up to do one thing and one thing well. And the best part is that these services are making themselves available to be used in ways the creators did not intend, and encouraging that development. Extensions are available for Firefox for any number of this sort of service. And developers are hungrily consuming those services, combining them with others and massaging them in ways not yet conceived of before now.

And that's a wonderful trend.