Despite the the dot-com bubble bursting at the turn of the new millennium, the Web has become more intelligent, successful, and profitable in the past ten years. We have a ton of people to thank for that, but let’s focus on two groups that are celebrating their 10th anniversaries this 2008.
Google is one of the first web companies that reinvented the web as we know it. It essentially paved the way for what we call the Web 2.0 era because it was the better search engine that would leave Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista, Lycos, Ask, and the rest behind.
True to its name, Google just keeps on getting bigger. It took on e-mail (Gmail), advertising (AdSense and AdWords), office suites (Docs, Spreadsheets, Sites), multimedia (YouTube, Picasa), navigation (Earth, Sky, Moon, Maps, Street View), and even web browsing (Chrome). And even if the thought of Google looking into what we’re looking at and what we’re talking about is really scary, life with the help of the big G is just easier.
A List Apart
In the same vein, A List Apart has been the definitive resource “for people who make websites”. What started out as a mailing list evolved into a treasure trove of elegant web design articles that cultivated the love for the craft like no other. Design, standards, accessibility, optimization, business—this magazine covers it all.
It’s written the pages of web design history as well, from banishing <table>-based layouts to inventing CSS techniques (Sliding Doors of CSS, Holy Grail, Suckerfish Dropdowns, Sprites, Faux Columns, Mountaintop Corners) we never could have come up with. Websites today are efficient, meaningful, and beautiful because of ALA.
Originally posted on October 8, 2008 @ 2:05 am