Nathan Levesque

If you’ve read some of my previous posts, me and the current state of web technology have shared a love-hate relationship, more so on the latter side of things recently. Frankly I think the web has reached the pinacle of it’s current incarnation. Sure, there are lots of companies out there working hard, but for all the effort, little progress has been made.

I’ve come to believe that the main culprit of this is the HTTP protocol. It’s inefficient and encourages uses of technologies such as HTML, XML, and JSON. These technologies had their time, but I would think by now that time should have passed.

To give a comparison, the web is in the same technology state as the automotive industry. Over the years cars have changed in appearance to fit the times and consumer appeal, and thus have websites changed. Sure some new technological offshoots have occured to support these changes, but these changes have been at best iterations.

Now we’re here in the year 2009 and the automotive industry is facing consumer pressure to find alternatives to expensive fuel consumption on diminishing fossil fuels. So the automotive industry has begun to respond with more fuel efficient vehicles, but that only delays the fact that we won’t be able to run on fossil fuels forever.

Similarly, the web continues to run on HTTP, all the while seemingly not realizing that this protocol and behavior is simply not maintainable if we ever want the web to move on.

Personally, I think binary protocols are the future of the web. Now I know the majority of web developers would cringe at that, saying they like plain text protocols, but really, why does the data need to be transfered in plain text as long as a binary transfer can be transcribed to a human readable format on the client end?

The problem lies in the transition and that problem is threefold: browser compatibility, site compatibility, and search indexing. Current browsers have a hard enough time with HTML and CSS, so a new protocol would need extremely strict compliance standards. Everyone is aware of these issues but consumers really don’t push back like they should.

Site compatibility covers the issues of existing sites that this new system would need to be backwards compatible with. Sites like this would probably be phased out gradually (when was the last time you saw a ‘96 era site that was popular? )

Finally, every search engine out there relies on theese plain text protocols for indexing, so some considerations would need to be made for them. Take for example the Flash format, which was not originally designed to be indexable, and now there are efforts to go back and make it indexable without majorly rearchitecting the format. It’s proven to be difficult so far.

There’s only so much HTTP can do, and while it does have it’s uses, there are better routes to go in the future.

It’s been nearly two months since my last post and I can honestly say it wasn’t for lack of wanting to. The last six months has become increasingly busy for me. Six months plus ~1 week ago I graduated from college. 6 months ago I started my first career job at My Perfect Gig, Inc. I work with great people there.

The side effect of that is my free time quickly dried up (all that life stuff got in the way) and I haven’t really had any time to do what I love to do: learn. The past few years have been a fury of learning new technologies or programming languages.

To change that I’ve decided to learn a) a new programming language and b) a new framework to use it in. My choice was Ruby and Merb. I’ve decided to take some time during this next week to focus more on that and also to hopefully come up with something more practical than a blog to add to this site.

In the past week or so I’ve begun development on a Flex-based Blog Engine. I don’t have any screenshots or videos of it yet, as it is not entirely functional yet.

It uses Flex,PureMVC, PHP, MySQL, and WebOrb for PHP.

In the meantime, check out the preliminary information and keep an eye out for updates!

I had an interesting thought tonight that I thought I’d share. Most of the recent Flash/Flex website fall into three primary categories in terms of interaction: applications, web page emulation or the ever-loathed eccentric designs. Obviously, applications are Flash sites that behave much more like traditional desktop applications. However, the other category is usually seen when someone is making a flash site in lieu of an HTML site, so we get a design that has behavior similar to HTML pages. Click button (Request), go to “page” with content (Response). “Page” transitions are pretty, but the use of these transitions usually add an extra unnecessary 200-300kb on the download. We’ve all seen our fair share of these sites, some hit some miss. The last category is the eccentric design category. These are the Flash sites you go to and spend 5 minutes trying to figure out how to navigate (or read instructions) and when you do, you get an experience worse than category 2.

Everyone hates the last category, tolerates, the second, and are usually very accepting of the last (only for those applications that follow typical application behaviors). There has to be some middle ground between the second two. Interaction that is neither entirely Request-Response nor eccentric. What would that be? I think what I’m looking for here is a paradigm that allows for standardized navigation but also asymmetrical flow of information. I’m not saying it would work, but it would certainly be worth exploring. Possibly some type of AI could be used that acts as a broker between the user and the content. How’s that for out of the box? An AI driven website?