The boundary between Web1 and Web2 was so subtle and incremental most people outside of tech didn’t even notice when it was crossed: when IE7 supported XmlHttpRequest in 2008, paving the way for rich UIs, JavaScript supremacy starting with jQuery, and what was then called Ajax.
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I’d jumped onboard just a year earlier, dumping printer research at Xerox to starting the Web2 research at the Webster lab in 2007. HTML5 was a utopian dream, Ajax was a poorly supported design pattern, jQuery was brand new, Rails was viewed with suspicion, Java ruled the lab.
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Again really lucky timing. I hired a student of the creator of jQuery from RIT (dumb luck) and a hardcore Rails guy (a couple of others at the lab dabbled in rails but for fun; serious work was in Java) and between them they really took my half-ass product ideas to the next level
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Compared to that — really a sustaining evolutionary level-up in hindsight — Web2 to Web3 seems like a brute revolutionary disruption accompanied by massive mutual cultural hostility. Everything sacred in Web2 is profane in Web3 and vice versa. Web 1 to Web2 was barely a ripple.
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