Numerous people who are better at keeping on top of things than I am have already talked about how good Ben Ward’s “Understand the Web” is, but I’m not going to let that stop me joining the chorus. With so much being thrown around about which proprietary vendor is more open, and what extra tool could be considered part of the HTML5 crowd, it’s good to see someone working to get to the core of what the web really is and working from there.
Want to know if your ‘HTML application’ is part of the web? Link me into it. Not just link me to it; link me into it. Not just to the black-box frontpage. Link me to a piece of content. Show me that it can be crawled, show me that we can draw strands of silk between the resources presented in your app. That is the web: The beautiful interconnection of navigable content. If your website locks content away in a container, outside the reach of hyperlinks, you’re not building any kind of ‘web’ app. You’re doing something else.
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Cross-platform user interface sucks. It’s a nightmare of inconsistency and wrong, momentarily obsoleted assumptions. But cross-platform content? Well that is content. It’s articles and poems and pictures and movies and music, everywhere! How brilliant is that!