A sexy new name for the Open Web Stack?
“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” said Juliet of Romeo.
Ultimately, in the heady world of Shakespearian romance, names do matter; if you’re name is Montague, you can’t marry someone called Capulet.
And certainly names matter in the more prosaic (but equally passionate) world of Web Standards. Until Jesse James Garrett coined the term “Ajax” we didn’t really have a phrase to refer to web applications that allowed parts of pages to be updated without refreshing the page. No matter that some Ajax depended neither on JavaScript nor XML; the name was a useful method to describe both the new techniques and the stepping-up of the users’ experience.
I find myself consistently grasping for an umbrella term to describe the new technologies available to us, such as HTML5, CSS 3, Geolocation, W3C Widgets, WAI-ARIA, Web Fonts, Web Storage, Web Sockets, SVG and the like.
I’ve been using “HTML5″ as such an umbrella term for new markup specs and APIs, but it’s inaccurate; Geolocation was never in the HTML5 specification although technologies such as Web Storage used to be until they were split out.
The orginators of the HTML5 specs, the WHATWG, have recently resurrected the term Web Applications 1.0 as a superspec to wrap up HTML5, pre-defined microdata vocabularies, Web Workers, Web Storage, Web Database, Server-sent Events, and Web Sockets.
But that still leaves SVG and CSS. The term “Web 2.0” is too tainted by marketing BS and synergy-speak to be useful—and also seems to mean social networking, or user-generated content or any number of buzzwords.
Do you have any ideas for a sexy new term? Do we need a sexy new term at all?
13 Responses to “ A sexy new name for the Open Web Stack? ”
What is wrong with the name Open Web? It describes it just fine, and goes well with a lot of other OpenX names (although they are usually camel case like OpenWeb). Open is a powerful word, which people rally behind, such as in Open Source, and well, the Web is a powerful word too. If marketeers need a version number then it can be Open Web 1.0, though maybe we are on a higher version number by now.
http://westciv.typepad.com/dog_or_higher/2005/12/i_invented_web_.html
that opportunity sadly passed
j
some unfiltered thinking out loud:
“Platform” doesn’t mean a thing to many non-geeks.
“Applications” a little more, but i don’t know, there’s also services, widgets, applets, programs, all somewhat vaguely defined and overlapping?
“Software” is in many languages translated into “software” 🙂
“open web software” doesn’t need to be replaced with something new as soon as the next open web standard becomes popular. And as “software” is a given, just leave it off: “open web”.
Or must it be a 3-letter acronym?
“WOW”?
“World Open Web”?
“We Open Web”?
“World of Web(craft)”?
“Wow Open Web”?
Well I’m off to the fridge and than coding a Super Visual Goody 🙂
What about H5+ ? Bit nerdy perhaps but short and to the point. Not sure it has to mean anything to anyone. Look at Comet – named after a cleaning product. Erm, H5+mates ?
I’d just go with Web Standards – or Latest Web Standards.
It may not be sexy, but it does still hold weight. And it does actually describe what these technologies are and why they are important.
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was gonna suggest Web Standards but it seems Andy already did.
That’s got my vote.
Going off of stelt’s WOW acronym:
Wide-Open-Web 🙂
Web 2.5 😉
How about “Web SP1”?
“Web 2.5”
Or we can go with the Open Source spirit and say Web 2.3.12.154 (And then we have to commit every time we want to change the general idea of the web).
How about Interwebbyness 09.
It seems that any umbrella term that becomes popular soon gets annihilated by marketers and/or amateurs and ends up on the dung heap. Perhaps we simply need individual names for each technology.