kuniform

Yow! I love using Bloglines as my RSS feed reader. First off, another great find by Ajaxian, cssdocs.org. Basically, it’s an autocomplete interface to the entire w3c’s CSS spec. A nifty example of how Web2.0, in part a presentation layer upheaval fueled by AJAX, can work at its best.
Today’s Sunspots at 37signals has a bunch of great links on shopping, death, getting the most out of high potential people at work, and what I take as the begining of the end of the Web2.0 hype curve. And on that note, here’s post from a few weeks ago by Bill Thompson pissing in the wind of the Web2.0 “revolution”. In it he argues that AJAX and Web2.0 is a presentation layer-only fad in which the true promise of distributed systems is being ignored in favor of fads. He’s right, but only to the extent that the means matters more than the ends.

In other words, if you are enabling networked social software, does it really matter what’s on the backend or which backend is being used? Joel Splosky gets all Frederick Brooks about this point, making it clear it is not the means—i.e.—tools or methods, but understanding the requirements that matter:

I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation.... If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet.