Web Evangelism got hard. When Zeldman wrote Designing With Web Standards, there were two standards that mattered: HTML and CSS. They were the path to cross-browser compatibility, and thus they were the route to a brighter future (both for design, and for information publishing.) 12 years later, holy shit. JavaScript joined the standards party, and then became quickly obfuscated by frameworks. CSS3 stablised, Webkit extended CSS further (and it’s still called CSS3), a plethora of new standards on the server and client: OAuth, OpenID, Contacts, Connect, Geolocation, microformats, widgets, AJAX, HTML5, local storage, SPDY, ‘The Cloud’…
All of these things are vying for attention and evangelism. Some of them are great, some of them are stupid, but they’re all clubbed together under this vague banner of ‘The Open Web’. It sets expectations and demands from developers, who are all the while being wowed by the efficiency and quality of proprietary application frameworks like Flash and Cocoa.