Controlling data is only half the story
JAMES HEIN

 
Good news for web developers, well potentially good news at least. Microsoft is planning to develop the next version of the Internet Explorer browser, version 8, to follow web standards by default. They will still retain a mode switching option however.

The issue is partially to avoid regulatory and legal problems. It is also a change from what the company has been saying to date, i.e. that IE will follow Microsoft standards. The move should help to appease some problems Microsoft has been having with the European Union.

For the user, if implemented correctly, this should allow the web surfer to render standard pages more consistently, but that of course remains to be seen. How much this is going to affect your coding practices, MS-specific or not, also remains to be seen.

So far the focus of our Web 2.0 discussions have been on participation but another major issue is the data itself - where that data is stored and who owns it. Consider our Web 2.0 examples so far: Each has been based around an ever-expanding database of some kind, typically a database of some specialised or focused nature. Napster had its distributed song database, eBay has its list of sellers, products and buyers, Google has web crawl, Yahoo! has its directory and so on. Other Web-based products also have their own databases sitting on servers, be they full of flight and booking information or Amazon's books and other products, in addition to user reviews.

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