"The Web needs fixing" says Yahoo! Architect Douglas Crockford bluntly, pointing out that the standards and recommendations that define the Web were last revised in 1999. In his keynote in March at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East in New York City, Crockford intends to argue that, since the Web has now grown from a document retrieval system into an application delivery system, the cleverness of the Web development community and the surprising expressive power of JavaScript have brought us to its very limits.

"The Web is no longer a driver of innovation," says Crockford. "It is now a serious impediment." But in his March AJAXWorld Keynote he will offer tangible Next Steps for how we can fix it.

SYS-CON.TV webcast of Douglas Crockford's overview of JSON,
from AJAXWorld 2006 West in Santa Clara, CA.

According to Crockford,  one of the things that AJAX has enabled are mashups, which he boldly calls "the most interesting innovation in software development in at least 20 years."

Here is Crockford's take on the flip side of mashups though:

In March 2008, his AJAXWorld Keynote will be titled "Can We Fix the Web?" and it  will focus on how the current Web is, as Crockford puts it, "overly complex and visually underpowered."

"It is hopelessly insecure. It is now under competitive assault by new proprietary platforms that hope to capture the next generation of applications. Can a system as large and as open as the web heal and adapt itself to the challenges of the 21st Century?"

His lofty aim, at AJAXWorld 2008 East: to show that it can, and to explain how.

AJAXWorld - March 18-20, 2008, New York City
The first one of the upcoming SYS-CON conferences is AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East, which will take place March 18-20, in New York City. Last year more than 70 companies sponsored it, including 3Tera, Addison-Wesley, Adobe, Apress, Backbase, Bindows, Conference Guru, Cynergy Systems, Dynamic Toolbar, Extension Media, Farata Systems, Flash Goddess, FrogLogic, GoingToMeet.com, Google, Helmi Technologies, IBM, ICEsoft, ILOG, IT Mill, Ittoolbox, JackBe, JetBrains, Kaazing, Krugle, Laszlo Systems, Lightstreamer, Manning Publications, Methods & Tools, Microsoft, Nexaweb, OpenSpot, OpSource, Oracle, Parasoft, Passport Corporation, PushToTest, Quasar Technologies, Rearden Commerce, Servoy, SmartClient / Isomorphic Software, SnapLogic, Sun Microsystems, TechTracker Media, Tele Atlas, The Thomson Corporation, ThinWire, TIBCO Software, TileStack, Universal Mind, Vertex Logic, Web Spiders, and Webtide.