tedrts

building websites. Even in this book, I’ve spent a good deal of time writing about
building websites. But make no mistake about it, a realtime user experience does not
exist entirely inside a web browser.
The original web browsers were designed to load and display web pages. The idea of
a web page is quite similar to the printed page. It is a static document, stored in a
computer, but a static document nonetheless. The interface of web browsers evolved
to work within this paradigm. There is a Next button and a Back button designed
to take you from the current page to the page that you viewed previously. That
makes perfect sense when you’re working with documents. However, the Web is quite
quickly shifting away from a document-based paradigm to a web-based form of
communication.
It used to be that a web page was more or less published to the Web. A page was created
and given a specific URI, and when the user went to that page, it was pretty clear what
to expect. Now we have sites like Facebook where the same URL is not only different
for each of the hundreds of