The Web is Us/ing Us

So, I'm signed up for the summer 2009 POSSE (Professors Open Source Summer Experience, I think). I'm looking forward to a focused week of working on open-source stuff. (More on those plans later.)

In preparation for POSSE, we're supposed to read and view a variety of things, many of which I've at least looked at before. One new thing to me is The Web is Us/ing Us, a short (5 minute) video about Web 2.0.

I'm trying to decide what I think about it (and why we were asked to watch it). Parts of it are stunning: I love the presentation style in which the author types and erases text to make a point. I like the general point that structural markup buys (and has bought us) a lot.

But I worry that some of it is shallow. Yeah, XML gives us separation of structural markup and formatting, but so did SGML, which predates HTML. Certainly, many of the "it's friendly for novices" stuff, such as 'blog authoring (and probably even 'blog aggregating) could have been done without XML. Wikis, for example, predate XML. And, as importantly, it's not XML that gives us all of those wonderful features, it's the document types that are built on top of XML. (We needed an RSS feed DTD before we could get many of the suggested features.) I worry that those kinds of things are lost in the hype.

Still, a spectacular presentation of what people can mean when they say Web 2.0.