> and deal with hundreds of pop-up ads. Web 2.0 was a strict increase in usability for every non-technical person I know.
I have no idea precisely what you are calling "Web 2.0" because in my mind, the technology elements of Web 2.0 outlined on the wikipedia page definitely have absolutely nothing to do with "getting URLs wrong", "forgetting TLDs". Changes from the same time period (around 1999) that were not typically considered to be part of "Web 2.0" were also responsible for a dramatic increase in the prevalence of popup ads. I think you're talking about something entirely different.
It's tricky because I don't know what Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 etc even mean since they're poorly defined. Generally I see the anti-Web2.0 digital vegan perspectives to be about opposing Javascript. I maintain that the Web after widespread Javascript was strictly more usable for non-technical people. I disagree that the pre-JS web was somehow incomplete or in a developer preview.
The dividing line between Web 1.0 and 2.0 was, roughly speaking, the dotcom crash. In terms of business model, Web 2.0 is the era of Freemium and User Generated Content, and of Google Adwords. One of the original poster children for this was Flickr, another was Blogger.
Technologically, there isn't much to separate the eras, except perhaps the deprecation of Big Iron approaches to infrastructure in favor of horizontal scaling with commodity hardware, but that's really a spectrum rather than a sharp division.
The Web 2.0 era really hasn't ended, regardless of how the web and it's infrastructure has evolved in the past 20 years. There are various candidates for what will define the next era, but so far none that are indisputably "it".
While XMLHttpRequest dates to approximately the same time period, it really didn't get a lot of mindshare until Google used it to implement Gmail's and Google Maps' front ends (2004-2005), which is also when the term AJAX was coined by Jesse James Garrett:
I see you are a stalwart defender of JavaScript :)
> Web after widespread JavaScript was strictly more usable for
non-technical people.
I suppose that's true. The "web" now has more reach, and generally
user interfaces have improved, and JavaScript has had many positive
effects on that improvement. But none of these things are necessarily
causative, and may be more or less coincidences along the timeline.
JavaScript solves some issues to do with presentation, and allowing
web browsers to compute things instead of needing a server to. It also
allows dangerous security holes, browser malware, spying on the user
and a host of "bad things". So whether the overall experience is an
"improvement" cannot be easily argued.
There are some "Web Applications" like browser based videoconferencing
that would be impossible without JavaScript. Whether these belong "in
the browser" is debatable. However the misuse of JavaScript to lazily
construct or decorate web content is a growing problem that is
denounced by all sorts of people, including web developers and
ordinary users who find their pages take ages to load, or function
sporadically, or leak information.
Have you used Gemini? Give it a try. Many non-technical people find it
very "usable" and it is a technology on-par with Web 1.0 in many ways.
> Generally I see the anti-Web2.0 digital vegan perspectives to be
about opposing JavaScript.
:) The DV arguments are much bigger and broader than JavaScript. But
to put it in that context for you; most people like myself argue that
JavaScript and other "web technologies" have transformed it into
something that isn't the web any longer. It doesn't function as an
information publishing and distribution system. It's still called "The
Web" by dint of evolutionary lineage, but in reality has transformed
into something unrecognisable (a surveillance engine and content
pushing system). The simple, safe and widely understood function
(that some here are calling Web 1.0) is now forced to live alongside
something else with no clear boundaries or distinctions between them,
and no sense of what parts of that technology are operating when you
visit a site. This is very bad for everyone regardless of the
usability gains obtained. I hope that makes sense.
I have no idea precisely what you are calling "Web 2.0" because in my mind, the technology elements of Web 2.0 outlined on the wikipedia page definitely have absolutely nothing to do with "getting URLs wrong", "forgetting TLDs". Changes from the same time period (around 1999) that were not typically considered to be part of "Web 2.0" were also responsible for a dramatic increase in the prevalence of popup ads. I think you're talking about something entirely different.