Datasheet
the system. The version of BuzzWatch presented in the last section does all that, and, even though it has
been kept as simple as possible for this first chapter, it works pretty efficiently and is rather fine looking.
There is, however, one big criticism that can be leveled at this version, a charge that applies to quite a
few Web 2.0 applications that you see in the real world.
The criticism is that, even though BuzzWatch is run in a browser and uses HTTP in a rather sensible way, it
acts more like one of those client/server applications from the 1990s than like a good web citizen. One of
the foundations of the World Wide Web is the notion of hypertext, which itself relies on URIs or URLs. This
version of BuzzWatch doesn’t expose proper hypertext documents or URLs for the objects that are being
manipulated. Is this a real issue, and can you ignore it? Yes, this is a serious issue and you should not
ignore it. Your users are used to keeping their favorite pages in bookmarks and sharing these bookmarks
either using a bookmark sharing system such as del.icio.us or by just copying and pasting them in an
e-mail or instant messaging system. If they like BuzzWatch, they’ll want to do so with the watches that
they use, too, and the current version of BuzzWatch, with its single URL that identifies only the application
doesn’t let them do so. Instead of being able to say “Have a look at
http://web2.0thebook.org/
buzzwatch/wj-a
,” they have to explain: “Open the BuzzWatch application, click the Go menu and choose
Wiley (wj-a)....” A side-effect of not using URLs is that they can’t use the Back and Forward buttons of their
browsers with BuzzWatch. It took several years for Web 1.0 applications to provide a decent support of the
Back and Forward buttons, and many Web 2.0 applications are still struggling with this issue!
Another consequence of this design is that BuzzWatch is not accessible. Web accessibility is an important
concept that means that you should try to make your applications accessible to as wide an audience as pos-
sible. A good way to check whether your application is accessible is to open it with a text browser such as
Lynx, and BuzzWatch doesn’t perform well at all if you try that. Figure 1-4 shows the dismaying result.
Figure 1-4
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Hello Web 2.0 World
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