What is the legacy of Web 1.0 and HTML 4 that developers seek to advance beyond?
HTML 4 provided us with a fairly stable set of form controls and widgets. However, the basic set of widgets have been around for a while, and one could argue they’ve become passe. Both users and authors are attracted to technology that is new, exciting and different. One can even add excitement to a page just by adding well-known widgets from the desktop world, such as menus, spreadsheets, sliders, progress meters, tab panels and tree views. These widgets have inexplicably been left out of HTML 4, and web authors not only want to use them in their web applications, they also want to innovate beyond them. Web 1.0 was about static content requested page by page. Original web accessibility guidelines were written to support this model. Web 2.0 involves building much more complicated user interfaces that load information dynamically from disparate information sources. A new accessibility framework is necessary to provide access to the rich set of information being exposed in Web 2.0.
