So Dan and I are sitting around the office …

... AKA the Common Ground coffee shop. And we’re commenting on how so many people are talking Web 2.0 this and Web 2.0 that, and while so doing these people point out one or a dozen sites or features or hacks, yet it’s still near impossible to get a good, clear understanding of what really makes something Web 2.0.

Is it the use of AJAX (AKA remote scripting and DHTML)? Hmm. Maybe, but people have been using that since 1998.

Maybe it’s simply using the word AJAX that makes a site Web 2.0. Nah; seems too easy.

Or is it the profuse display of pastel boxes with nice curved corners and gradient backgrounds? Or combining data from two or more other Webs sites (ideally, each also being Web 2.0)?

It would be nice, we thought, if there was a simple tool, a validator, that could examine a Web site and declare, with complete scientific authority, if it was or was not really Web 2.0. So James gets coding …

... and after about 30 minutes of Og/Nitro hacking the first Web 2.0 validator was born.

The idea was simple:

• Allow the user to enter a URL
• Fetch the source for the site (well, the main page at least)
• Run the page through a battery of tests.

One page, with some modern styling, plus some spiffy DOM scripting tossed in for good effect.

It worked well enough, and the initial code was fairly clever in how validation rules were loaded and executed.

Read The Full Story …

Visit the site: http://web2.0validator.com/