Weblog
Back in the 20th century, this blog made its debut as an incoherent jumble of HTML markup. A freshman in high school and a bona fide stupid-idiot-loser-kid, I used to hand-code my posts into an index page laid out in tables (gasp) using a web-based text editor provided by one of those free hosting services, like Geocities or Tripod. Instead of using paragraph tags (<p>), I used line breaks (<BR>, XHTML-noncompliant) to delineate bodies of text, and there were no stylesheets to be seen for miles.
Now though, you won’t find a single <table> tag in this page (except for that one), and the only amount of hard-coded style you’ll find is the occasional <b> element. I now compose my posts in a fancy WordPress textbox, which, although still web-based, allows me to simultaneously view the rendered content and tweak the underlying HTML. In the <head> of the document, you’ll find pointers to Atom and RSS feeds, for which I will soon add links, and all of the content management now takes place independent of the observable presentation.
My job this summer compelled me to pick up on these standards as a part of the work I did, whereas before I was mostly ignorant of the basic methodology behind web-based publishing. What I find most amusing is that so much of the world is just as oblivious as I once was to feeds, certain design principles, and all the emerging technologies that make surfing the ‘Net a richer experience. Furthermore, it does seem like it is in fact the purpose of the Semantic Web/Web 2.0 to abstract the raw execution of the web application away from the user and to ultimately effect a more seamless experience. This trend is certainly evident in AJAX implementations.
WordPress is great, by the way.