Since the September that never ended (the point where the unwashed masses — us — got on the inter­net), the web has been rife with buzzwords. New buzzwords came and old buzzwords went, or worse, kept on linger­ing wait­ing to be revived (I’m look­ing at you Web 1.964beta). Amongst all this mad­ness some people, try­ing to put some sub­stance into the buzz, have tried to redefine them.

A recent example of this is Cameron Moll’s recent art­icle on A List Apart. I must note here that rede­fin­ing wasn’t really the point of the art­icle, but some (read: quite a lot of) people (mis)took it as such. In this art­icle Cameron talks about re-alignment versus redesign of web­sites, explain­ing that an incre­mental approach to design­ing an exist­ing site is quite a good thing. You can think of it as evol­u­tion versus revolu­tion; the former might seem slower, but it does bring a lot more refine­ment than the latter.

Good advice right? Well I’d say so, but cer­tain people got hung up on the use of re-align, say­ing it brought a new word with new buzz, thus cre­at­ing con­fu­sion. People, get over it. New ways of using words to express ones ideas bet­ter are being cre­ated all the time. It’s the way lan­guage works. Just say­ing that restyl­ing vs. redesign already means redesign vs. re-align is ridicu­lous. Redesign used to be a broad term, being used for little tweaks as well as full-blown new designs of an exist­ing site. However, as time passed, redesign became syn­onym­ous with the full-blown new design of an exist­ing site. The May 1st Reboot and CSS Reboot events have pretty much cemen­ted this into the col­lect­ive mind of the web (no I’m not going to say blogosphere..yuk!). Ironically, this slag­ging of re-align only increases it’s expos­ure as a buzzword so I really feel they’re shoot­ing them­selves in the foot. Others have dif­fer­ent reas­ons for call­ing it harm­ful.

That same Anne (who I had the pleas­ure of meet­ing at the last Happy Clog meet­ing) men­tioned in the a former post that xHTML has quite a num­ber of down­sides. As these include for­ward and back­wards com­pat­ib­il­ity, they’re quite hefty. The upsides how­ever seem to be zilch at present (except­ing, maybe, search engine optim­isa­tion). HTML, on the other hand, seems to be get­ting a proper spec, writ­ten with the web in mind. I myself have half a mind to change over to HTML 5 once the spec’s fin­ished. Note that this is simply a recon­sidered pos­i­tion and has noth­ing to do with inflam­mat­ory dead horses.

Moving on to the curi­ous post on SimpleBits about using ‘CSS patch’ instead of ‘CSS hack’ to get rid of the neg­at­ive con­nota­tion that’s asso­ci­ated with the term ‘hack’ (even though it has noble begin­nings, one can’t deny that due to server crack­ers being known hack­ers, hack has a neg­at­ive mean­ing now). Thus it’s handy to use another term when you’re explain­ing your hacks to Pointy Haired Bosses. This doesn’t mean that CSS hacks should be endorsed or encour­aged, in my eyes it’s still a last resort.

So do I dis­agree with everything in those twin-posts? Nah, Web 2.0 is just as mean­ing­less as three (or was it four?) years ago. After see­ing the OSCON key­note by Dick Hardt on Identity 2.0 I have some hope that server-side client-focussed (i.e. stuff requires noth­ing extra of the user but does make life easier for them) innov­a­tions like Identity 2.0 seems to be get as much atten­tion as the client-side stuff (like remote JavaScript).

That’s another thing. JavaScript has become cool, nay, accept­able again! After the night­mare that was DHTML, we’ve now got a foot­balling cleans­ing acronym for ‘cool JavaScript stuff’ called AJAX. (Thanks Adaptive Path!) Even though they saw it as ‘a new approach to web applic­a­tions’ it seems that everything con­nec­ted to JavaScript has the tend­ency to over hype bey­ond belief. Compared to DHTML (Dynamic HTML) AJAX does have one sav­ing grace. It provides a method of shov­ing more heavy lift­ing to the server-side where, in my mind, it belongs (cer­tainly if the mobile web ever takes off).

So are there any buzzwords worth slag­ging hard? Absolutely.