The Value of Web 3.0

The value of web 3.0 will be in its content, not in the technology to deliver it. To succeed, a company must make extremely efficient use of techonology for delivery, and focus on valuable content resources (people).

As with everything, the web is becoming increasingly specialized. Pure social networks that are intended to serve as resources will be replaced by managed content systems where the bulk of the material is posted by professionals and site visitors will offer supplementary content.

There are great opportunities for building sites of user contributed content, but the users should be qualified, and they should be rewarded with some benefit. An example would be a teachers’ system. Teachers (who are intelligent, resourceful, and creative) can share materials with other professionals in the education field. Their contributions can be rated, and those ratings can be used to offer items of value. For example, gift cards to stores that offer products they may appreciate - either personal or professional. In this case, the producers and consumers are from the same population. Another module could be to have medical professionals offer content for the general public. These are just examples.

The platforms these are built on must be extremely robust. The software itself is actually of limited value - it is only important to deliver the content, but that content must be protected, and preserved. This requires a careful storage architecture that should be portable.

Micro Pages for Web 3.0 ?

More web 3.0 ideas

  • Build pages as collections of frames or iframes
  • Construct alternate access for pages to allow subsections to be delivered. This means a page could have a ‘full’ mode, or a ‘piece’ mode. ‘Full’ mode would deliver the entire page, ‘piece’ mode would deliver a designated piece of the page.
  • Use AJAX (with care), or dojo widgets (with care!)
  • Look into Google gadgets (I confess I haven’t done this yet)

Web 3.0 Implementation Ideas

This are very rough ideas.

Imagine requesting a page, identifying the start and end of the parts you are interested in, setting the BASE tag as appropriate, and leaving the contents of the HEAD section. That may deliver a functional page segment.

The idea is to pull in content from a page, that may not be constructed to deliver its content in segments. In other words, a traditional web page, intended to function as a unit - not a collection of elements.

Later refinements could filter unused elements to reduce the bandwidth requirements.

The Back/Forward buttons

If you have post data, the browser will alert you on Back/Forward buttons. Sometimes, this is inconvenient. An option is to calculate the length of the GET string, and if it is within your tolerance, whatever that may be, change the form method to “GET".

Works great. Very little effort. Code includes dojo.


/* Check to see if you can create a get string of less than 255 characters */
var aInputs=('id_of_first_input','id_of_second_input','etc');
var l=aInputs.length;
for (i=0;i<l;i++)
	if (dojo.byId(aInputs[i]) != null)	
		sD+=aInputs[i]+'='+dojo.byId(aInputs[i]).value+'&';
if (sD.length < 255)
	frm.method='get';

* Within your tolerance refers to the fact that different browsers and servers may function … differently.

PHP Sessions

I’m used to working on busy public servers. For my latest project, I have a server all to myself (what fun!). Could not understand why the sessions weren’t timing out.

The key php.ini settings that resolved the issue were the garbage collection numbers. After all, PHP doesn’t check the session files for timeouts on every request.

In addition, if you don’t assign a value to a session variable on every request, the timestamp on the file isn’t updated - so the session will timeout regardless of activity.

:oops:

PHP Sessions

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.session.php

session.gc_probability
session.gc_divisor
session.gc_maxlifetime

Cookies

To use the cookie to limit the session length, regardless of activity, use session_set_cookie_params to set the lifetime of the cookie.

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.session-set-cookie-params.php