My websites will only support the latest browser versions

The web is a living, breathing, ever-changing, interlinked, and evolving mass of documents, data, and applications. By its very nature, it is decentralised and immediate. The web, in all its chaotic beauty, is – and has always been – versionless. What version is Gmail at? Or Facebook? Do you know? Do you care? Does it matter? No.

Furthermore, any mechanism used to access a versionless resource like the web should itself be similarly versionless. Otherwise, you will get an impedance mismatch between the resource itself and its means of consumption. This simple truism led me to tweet the #oneversion #manifesto:

"#oneversion #manifesto My websites will only support the latest versions of browsers. It's the browser makers' duty to get users to upgrade."

So the web is versionless and yet we seem determined to scar it with the branding irons of numeric order for our own petty conveniences.

When Tim O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0, for example, it worked as a rallying cry for developers to focus on web standards, open data, and APIs. That snapshot – however artificial it may have been – helped to define the ideological and practical shift away from the equally stereotypical snapshot that was the Wild West of Web 1.0: a post-apocalyptic wasteland littered with the casualties of the browser wars and riddled with the abuses of table-based layouts and the unfortunate spaghetti-soup tragedies of Perl/HTML/JavaScript code. But Web 2.0 never described the true state of the web at any given time. It was simply a convenient fiction that gave us a starting point to discuss where the web had been, where we thought it was, and where we thought it should be. But what did Web 2.0 really mean? There were as many definitions as there were marketers trying to sell you Web 2.0 solutions.

And that's the crux of the issue here: applying version numbers to something that is inherently versionless is meaningless beyond being a marketing exercise aimed at selling you the latest and greatest upgrade. As we are finally embracing the realisation that software is a service, even that use today is of dubious utility.

Version numbers, like milestones on highways that tell you how much longer you have to a destination, are useful when they occur at wide-enough apart intervals so as to present us with a gentle rhythm of progress. Software development today, however, comprises continuous improvements measured in inches not miles (or, ideally, in centimetres, not kilometres, like the rest of the civilised world). Version numbers are a relic from the dark ages of computing when software upgrade cycles spanned months (if not years) instead of days (if not hours) and distribution and upgrades meant shipping flimsy physical objects with data on them – not a seamless upgrade through the internet that the user need not even notice occurred.

Overwhelming users

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