This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Web Buzz by Douglas Clifton. Original Post: 2005 and Beyond Feed Title: blogZero Feed URL: http://loadaveragezero.com/app/s9y/index.php?/feeds/index.rss1 Feed Description: Web Development News, Culture and Opinion Latest Web Buzz Posts Latest Web Buzz Posts by Douglas Clifton Latest Posts From blogZero

I began building drx (the software at least) because, frankly, most of the Web developer resource sites are lame. I was looking for something that had a clearly defined set of a categories (a taxonomy if you want to use a fancy term), that was fully indexed and searchable, that had impartial/unbiased reviews by a knowledgeable, third-party person (or persons). And so on.

I also stood to gain a lot of information about the state of the Web and the programmers and designers that drive new technologies. Hell, the authors index alone is a veritable who's-who of past and present Web innovators.

It was also simply an exercise meant to improve my skills through the process of designing and building the software. Armed with this list of motivations, I began to piece drx together in March of 2005. And like many software projects it evolved over time. As it turns out, programming it was the easy part. Populating the list is what really turned out to be time consuming. And while my diligence has trailed off a little, (or my pickiness has increased perhaps), I still add to the list regularly.

Indexing is power, and it gives you many views of the same data. For instance, this time of year we see the ubiquitous "Best of 2005" lists, every blog on the planet seems to have one. Which I find amusing, since I've had a growing best list (or rated 5 stars to be more precise) all year. Funny, as it turns out there are exactly 100 on the list, a nice round figure and purely an accident.

So what's still MIA? Well, the most glaring omission is Javascript/ECMAscript and the DOM. Interestingly, the main reason I failed to include it in the first place is because my own interests and were on the server-side (and open-source in particular) of the equation. Well, and I hate to fall into the abuse of poor jargon trap, AJAX and "Web 2.0" has changed all of that. Not to mention how clearly a language like Javascript has changed the client-side (and by that I mean browsers).

Which leads me to my overall pick for 2005. Easily, hands-down, this is Firefox. You can argue all you want about which browser is "best," but you cannot deny what a powerful impact Mozilla has had on the Web this year. The plethora of extensions, particularly those for Web developers, alone should prove this point.

And may 2006 bring many more innovations, and hopefully a little less hype!

Yeah, right, he said.