The term Web 2.0 was first coined by Tim O’Reilly in late 2004 at a web technologies conference. In his paper ‘What Is Web 2.0 – Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’, Tim O’Reilly identifies that “in the year and a half since, the term Web 2.0 was taken hold…there’s still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means.” In fact, the term as described by Tim O’Reilly doesn’t, like many important concepts, “have a hard boundary, but rather a gravitational core”. – meaning, there is no single set of rules which can really define what constitutes something to be Web 2.0.

The internet that we know and love today is very different to the one we knew five years ago. Todays designs are governed by standards and advancements in technology allow us to send large amounts of data across the web in the blink of an eye.

Five years ago this story was very different, designer’s where building websites that were not always cross browser compatible, accessible or in fact syntactically correct. So how has this movement in web standards come about and how is it affecting the way in which we design today?