The big blue onion

Strategic Finance, Nov 1, 2007 by Michael Castelluccio

* Recently, eWeek celebrated ViolaWWW's 15th birthday with a list of their candidates for the top Web technologies of all time. Viola was an early patriarch/matriarch of our modern Web browsers. It was developed by Pei-Yuan Wei, a student at U.C. Berkeley, and was released in 1992. A very fundamental browser, it could move between pages with a backward and forward button, could bookmark pages, and kept a history of addresses visited. It wasn't much more than a transfer of the hypertext ability of Hypercard, a hypermedia system designed for Apple, to a Windows environment, but it opened a door.

In the 15 years since Viola, the Web has woven its network outward, covering the entire earth. And as you read the list of eWeek's top Web technologies, another analogy comes to mind. The technologies of the Web all wrap their cooperating systems around a hypertext core resembling something like a planetary onion with a surface glowing with millions of flashing connections.

The cosmology of the planet combines the gravitational forces of its elemental technologies like hypertext linking, packet-switching transfers, and locked-down addresses with the forces of good, old-fashioned creative destruction to keep the waters all over its surface constantly changing and its layered atmospheres swirling. The general rules are written and rewritten on the fly, and conventional wisdom can be the anchor that will slide your enterprise right off the surface.

A while ago we looked at Woot.com, an online retailer that sells a single product one day at a time. A business model based on "one deal a day" would be laughable in what used to be called the bricks and mortar world. But on the planet, the general rule is good tech lives--bad tech falls off--forget about what has worked elsewhere. In fact, you're almost better off shying away from the institutional experts. Early on, Bill Gates declared that the Internet was a fad and that it wouldn't last very long. Look to the kids in places like Stanford--people like Brin and Page--if you want to keep yourself firmly planted. Even so, the American addiction to dynamic change has no better platform than the Web. What you create today can be edited two minutes after you publish/post it.

Top Technologies

In the list of 30 all-time best technologies, the top five include two languages, one browser, a transfer protocol, and a server software program.

Number one and number two are XML and HTML, markup languages that let you translate your text and other content into a form the Web can display and pass around. Also close to the core (fourth listed) is Tim Berners-Lee's HTTP, a transfer protocol that creates the whole connection layer for the World Wide Web. Naturally, a browser has to be in this inner circle, and eWeek lists Netscape Navigator in third place because of its importance as the Web's first killer app. And rounding out the top five of the best of the best is what the editors call the most successful open-source product of all time. Apache is the Web server software that runs most websites online today, and though most people know about the Apple OS, Windows, and even the Linux/Unix applications that run their computers, few have seen the feather logo or know the name Apache. These top five hold the center from flying apart.

Because the browser is the most obvious Web application and because the Web wouldn't work without them, the editors list no fewer than eight browsers, some of which have long ago slipped away. The three seen most often today are Fire-fox (grandson of Netscape Navigator), Internet Explorer, and Opera, the free Norwegian browser that eWeek calls "one of the most innovative and cutting-edge Web browsers available." Some of the predecessors mentioned are Mosaic, Viola, Lynx, and Spyglass. The Web browser has evolved as new versions incorporate new technologies, security, graphic ability, and speed. Feature creep has also layered on additional functions.

To write a Web page, you used to just hand-code the text with HTML markup language. The basic design for the page could be managed by marking off areas with tables and/or frames. Then, companies like Macro-media and Microsoft created Web development software that included, along with the code pages, another layer on which you managed content with graphical tools that did much of the formatting and all of the HTML coding for you. You could shift between code, design, and preview pages and actually create Web content without ever touching or learning HTML. It was there, but it was one layer down.

The Web developer programs mentioned in the list are HotMetal, one of the first WYSIWIG (what-yousee-is-what-you-get) developers, and Dreamweaver, today's standard for professional Web developers, now owned by Adobe. Very popular, but not on the list, is Microsoft's FrontPage, which has evolved into Expression Web. These developers take content preparation from HTML text manipulation to highly styled multimedia page content. Dreamweaver is usually used in conjunction with other Adobe Web products such as Flash (also on the top-tech list) and Fireworks or Photoshop. The HTML code is still the base, but the formatting above it gets pretty sophisticated.