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        Given the lack of set standards as to what "Web 2.0" actually means, implies, or requires, the term can mean radically different things to different people. For instance, many people pushing Web 2.0 talk about well-formed, validated HTML; however, not many production sites actually adhere to this standard.   Many people will also talk about web-sites "degrading gracefully" (designing a web-site so that its fundamental features remain usable by people who access it with software that does not support every technology employed by the site); however, the addition of Ajax scripting to web-sites can render them completely unusable to anyone browsing with JavaScript turned off, or using a slightly older browser. Many have complained that the proliferation of Ajax scripts, in combination with unknowledgeable webmasters, has increased the instances of "tag soup": web-pages where coders have apparently thrown tags and other semantically useless tags about the HTML-file with little organization in mind, in a way that occurred more commonly during the dot-com boom, and which many standards-proponents have tried to eschew. Some critics also object to cluttered, arcane navigation structures in Web 2.0 web-sites.
        Many of the ideas of Web 2.0 were already featured on networked systems well before the term "Web 2.0" emerged. Amazon.com, for instance, has allowed users to write reviews and consumer guides since its inception, in a form of self-publishing. Amazon also opened its API to outside developers in 2002. Prior art also comes from research in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning and Computer Supported Cooperative Work and from established products like Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino.

        Conversely, when a web-site proclaims itself "Web 2.0" for the use of some trivial feature (such as blogs or gradient boxes) observers may generally consider it more an attempt at self-promotion than an actual endorsement of the ideas behind Web 2.0. "Web 2.0" in such circumstances has sometimes sunk simply to the status of a marketing buzzword, like 'synergy', that can mean whatever a salesperson wants it to mean, with little connection to most of the worthy but (currently) unrelated ideas originally brought together under the "Web 2.0" banner. The argument also exists that "Web 2.0" does not represent a new version of World Wide Web at all, but merely continues to use "Web 1.0" technologies and concepts.

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Last updated November 29, 2006