The challenge is simple. Build something that inspires the Web and keep it as small as possible. You can cheat a bit though. You may use jQuery (which weighs in at over double the entire challenge-limit), Prototype and Typekit as your tools.

Fantastic idea. My favorite submission so far is gravity.

The next version of Webkit that will be released will come with a new version of the Web Inspector, a tool used by Web developers to “inspect” an already-loaded Web page for debugging, testing, etc., that has some really great new features thanks in part to Joseph Pecoraro.

I love that I can choose either Safari or Chrome and I will still benefit from this update.

Even though he’s publishing all of these “drafts” on the site for free, I will be getting the paper version when it is published.

Via John Gruber.

Fellow Viddler and friend Kyle Slattery is reworking his tag search pages. He’s created a really nice way to filter through the various types of content on his site based on tag search results. For instance, going to a tag search for my name will result in a few photos and a few links that he tagged with my name. You can then filter those results to only show you the photos or only the links.

But what if you hack the URL and search for a tag that shows no results? At current Kyle shows an error page. However, there was no error. His Web site should never link you to a page that doesn’t return any results (though it does right now). So how did the person end up here? They may have done a search, they may have hacked the URL, or someone else linked them to this page. Which ever way they ended up on that URL – there is still no reason to show an error.

This brings me to why I call these types of URLs “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for URLs”. These are URLs where you know what the person is looking for (droids) you just don’t have any. In the example URL I use above, a tag search for my name filtered by entries, Kyle does a good job of stating that there are no entries tagged with my name. This is much better than showing an error. In the other example, of a tag search that ultimately returns no results, he should do something very similar. This isn’t an error. There is just no content on his site that is tagged with ‘asdf’.

One of the suggestions I gave to him was to do a search through his own tags and try to see if, perhaps, they’ve mistyped the tag. I’m not sure what ‘asdf’ could have been, maybe sad? Or, what if someone spells my name with two Ls? This isn’t easy to program against – but there is an easier option that he could set up. Offer a search box with the tag that they entered already filled in and show a message of “Sorry, but I have nothing tagged with ‘asdf’. Maybe you misspelled what you’re looking for?”

My site isn’t a good example of best practices here. It used to be. But I had to hack WordPress to bits to get it to work last time and I’ve since upgraded WordPress too many times for those old hacks to work. However, if you’re looking for good examples – I’m sure Kyle’s site will end up being a pretty good example soon enough.

Have you seen any really good examples of this?

There are several sites, some still in existence that I really do miss. I remember spending hours on the old Deviant Art just trying to find minimalist desktops and indy art. I also remember digging, refreshing (what is that anymore?) and bookmarking countless pages on The Force.net to find the latest and greatest information on release of the Star Wars Special Editions. I remember pulling my damned hair out trying to get ASP to do what I wanted by using Microsoft’s documentation.

It goes beyond sites though, since back then the web wasn’t about usage but rather building the foundation for what we have today. Using the Web in the 90s wasn’t, for me, about sharing photos and bookmarks, or creating and distributing content quickly and easily, it was about communication and expression of thoughts via hypertext. The more I think about Web 2.0, the clearer the picture becomes about the Web as a whole. We have an insanely far distance to travel before the Web becomes what it has the potential to be. Obviously services like Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Newsvine are getting closer to what we’d all love to see replacing Deviant Art, e-mailing bookmarks, and CNN, but they are still only very simple concepts done in fairly complex ways.

I listened to a few of the Carson Workshop podcasts and, I must say, I realized how complex our jobs sound to the “average uninformed developer”. Combine the complexity of learning the “best practices” in Web development with how many developers out there that are still using tables for layout, Microsoft Access databases, and reading Lockergnome for HTML tips, and you can see that we’re not even close to where we could/should be.

What makes it even worse is that the people that could be advocating these changes in the new and ignorant developers, are resting on their laurels or even bad-mouthing efforts to help out. Perhaps such efforts as Naked CSS Day won’t make a large impact on Web Standards Awareness, but who cares, at least Dunstan Diaz is trying to do something about it!

“Back in the day” (according to Dane Cook this was indeed a Wednesday) I was always amazed when new specs were released, new technologies developed, or different ways of accomplishing tasks were mastered. Nowadays, I see a lot of copying going on. Sure, we have our elite few that are definitely leading the innovation pack, but in the old days everyone was an innovator. If you couldn’t get something to work, you figured out a way to do it regardless. You busted down walls, you hacked like a mad-man, until finally the result you were looking for was accomplished. Nowadays, you run to Google and do about four searches and copy what someone else has done right from their site. Sometimes this is good, but if you find yourself doing this every time, it isn’t.

I suppose I miss the speed at which innovation seemed to be moving on the Web. Even at 56kbps and under, it surely seemed that the Web was changing faster in 1996-1999 than it is now. I think we’ve hit a Web 2.0 plateau where 10 major services were released and everyone else is trying to catch up with them instead of trying to do better than them.

Take microformats for example. A great effort. Standardize the way specific chunks of content are marked up, this way it will make it much easier to move, distribute, and work with going forward. However, some of these standards are just atrocious. I look forward to trying my hand at making some updates to some of those specs in the near future, but instead of trying to simply use microformats, we need more than just five people thinking about how to improve them.

Recently we’ve seen a gathering for an RSS Advisory Board. Thank heavens, the last guy that was running the show was not only an asshat, but he made Communism look like Kazaa (if you don’t get this joke you probably have a life, which is cool – can I borrow it?). I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with RSS in the near, and distant, future.

AJAX. Oh god, do not get me started. A superb effort has been put into improving not only awareness but accessibility, implementation, and documentation of the HTTPRequest Object. Sure, we’ve had these types of abilities for ages, but I still think all this “excitement” will lead to one good thing – improvements. Ajax, while not revolutionary at all, has caused many newbies to open their eyes to, not only standards (due to the use of XML, etc), but also to the thinking a little bit beyond the separation of presentation and content – but also of functionality. I’d like to put a name on this particular movement, but I doubt the World could hold such an acronym.

I said we’re on a plateau right now, but I think that might be incorrect. Rather, I believe we are on the escalator. The down escalator. And, instead of actually going down with it, we’re trudging onward and upward – each foot landing on the next step only to find another one approaching right after it. This battle to make the Web better may never really “end” but I definitely think we need to pick up the pace a little. Like back in the old days when we said “Screw you” to tables for layout, WYSIWYG editors that wrote horrible HTML, and oh yeah – Windows servers.

[tags]internet, web 2.0, ajax, web development, programming, microformats[/tags]