Think about the challenge of web sites for the past 10 years - trying to come up with mostly 2D metaphors to express rich user experiences with limited bandwidth and limited tools.
A good example of this creative style is www.pinpointshopping.com or www.bmw.ca (both of which I was involved in building when I as at Blast Radius). This is the peak of the 2D, artificial metaphor style of the Web 1.0 generation. The whole mantra of Web 1.0 design was about using Flash, HTML, Javascript, etc. to design these artificial metaphors to create some emotional experience out of a narrow band, browser constrained pipe.
Even the terminology speaks of constraint - the Web (instead of simply software), browser (because you needed a special device), Broadband (because that was at least better than narrow band), Web Page (because it had to be a 2d screen with text), etc. All of these terms are reactions to constraint.
Its like saying a movie has "special effects" - in the mid-70s special effects were the latest thing and were really separate from the movie production. You did your film shooting and then you spent a year getting some science nerds to play with some models against a blue screen to create an extra 30 seconds of footage. Now the entire movie is special effects - the term is simply obsolete.
Fast forward 30 years from 1977 when the first Star Wars movie was made to today. I just saw 300 the other day and its staggering what they can now do with a movie production. The difference is not incremental - its a paradigm shift. It not simply, "look how many more things we can do with special effects" - it's "we can do anything". That's a fundamental difference in how movies are made and it started with movies like The Matrix, the Star Wars 2.0 movies (which proves that an unlimited palette doesn't necessarily make for a better movie), Shrek, and in the past year Sin City and 300.
We're just moving into this era with the Internet. Here are some examples of the first "unlimited" Internet applications:
1. XBOX 360, PS3
2. Google Earth
3. World of Warcraft
A web site and World of Warcraft are both "Web based applications". World of Warcraft is fundamentally different in that it doesn't have to live within an artificial application (a browser), an artificial 2D window, or a 2D display of content. The tooling available to create a virtual 3D environment while not quite limitless (its still somewhat constrained on today's bandwidth/hardware) is certainly getting there in terms of ability to provide creative designers the engine to create experiences as they envision them instead of focusing on how creative ways to overcome obstacles.
It's the difference between Empire Strikes Back and 300.
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