The Next Step

[jkd]

I feel like this is a recurring theme with me, declaring the stagnation of the web.

This whole AJAX buzz is based on old technology which web developers finally caught up to. I'm going to argue that there hasn't been anything fundamentally new in web development in at least 6 years. I would say 10 years, since this AJAX business was doable in 4th generation web browsers, but Internet Explorer introduced "behaviors" in IE5, which I believe was a fundamentally different way of viewing DHTML (the capability is superseded by Mozilla's XBL, though Opera and Safari are yet to implement a binding language).

I used to be of the opinion that SVG would bring something new to the game, but we have had Flash for years. Vector graphics, even if they are in an open, standardized XML format, won't change anything.

E4X (implemented in Firefox, though not DOM-live) makes XML easier, but doesn't change what is possible.

There was always "something" available to point to and say that tomorrow could utilize this, but I honestly don't see any candidate feature or technology for this. There is the whole XML UI thing going on (XUL, XAML, Flex, Laszlo), but those aren't necessarily well-suited for the web. I expect to see more seamless web applications leveraging those technologies (rather than abusing HTML and XMLHttpRequest), but once again, nothing different.

It seems we are out of revolutions, and only have evolutions (on the client, at least). Accessibility, scripting speed, UI -- these will be made better for the web developer for certain. Yet, as a web developer, do you feel comfortable coding the same mind-numbingly boring code for ridiculously-high contractor prices for the rest of your career? Is there anything that could reintroduce the "revolution" part of client-side technology?

[Troy297]

Well.... for me the "exciting" part of coding a webpage/website is being able to try out new things, see how/if they work, what browsers they work in, which they don't, and so on.... but revolutionaize eh?

Nothing really that I can think of aside from minor changes in how a site must be coded to be deemed W3C Compliant....... to revolutionize the web now would be quite the task for the single reason that the web is so common now... to completely revolutionize it would take something huge! Like we're not talking just a new language or something but like a completely new protocol to go along with it or something.... just a thought...

[oracleguy]

It seems we are out of revolutions, and only have evolutions (on the client, at least). Accessibility, scripting speed, UI -- these will be made better for the web developer for certain. Yet, as a web developer, do you feel comfortable coding the same mind-numbingly boring code for ridiculously-high contractor prices for the rest of your career? Is there anything that could reintroduce the "revolution" part of client-side technology?

You definitely have a point; I mean what can you really add at this point? But I think part of the problem isn't limited to the web, it extends to the rest of the computer's interface. The basic GUI layout you find in say like Windows, KDE, OS X, etc. has been essentially the same for years, there hasn't been anything new, just the same. And people know its a problem, Microsoft has tried to solve the problem by making their GUI super pretty and require a DX9 graphics card but in truth, they honestly don't know. They don't have any real good ideas like the GUI transition from Windows 3.x to 95.

The next big revolution isn't going to be just software, it's going to be a software and hardware change. Even if the overall computer interface doesn't change, unless there is some sort of new way to browse the web, it is going to be that same old boring code, over and over. While I'm hesitant to say so, the wide spread adoption of AJAX and such to create more interactive websites was a smaller but similar change.

But I've felt the stagnation you are talking about, it's one of the reasons I haven't been doing a lot of web development lately. Other programming areas like making applications that are completely cross platform and things like that have kept me more entertained. Things like that are really going to be important, especially with more of a transition to Linux on the desktop becoming more popular.

[Pennimus]

If there are no revolutions in web development in the next 10 years I'll personally be a happy man. Lets not forget that 99% of web sites out there have still failed to properly grasp how to use HTML and CSS let alone any of the other possible technologies. Perhaps a period of stagnation is what is needed to fix this situation.

[gsnedders]

The basic GUI layout you find in say like Windows, KDE, OS X, etc. has been essentially the same for years, there hasn't been anything new, just the same.
…and on the subject of OS X's UI, it's worth pointing out that the majority of its UI comes from NeXTSTEP (which shipped in 1989) and the Macintosh (shipped in 1984).

As for nothing changing, what about RSS and Atom?

[jkd]

If there are no revolutions in web development in the next 10 years I'll personally be a happy man. Lets not forget that 99% of web sites out there have still failed to properly grasp how to use HTML and CSS let alone any of the other possible technologies. Perhaps a period of stagnation is what is needed to fix this situation.

Then 10 years from now the client will have nothing better. Everything possible with what we have appears to be done, you just often need to work around browser incompatibilities. The evolution is that those incompatibilities will be wrinkled out, but the client doesn't see that, only the developer.

As for RSS/Atom, something like less than 1% of web surfers utilize it, and its just a static format that offers updates in a more convenient format than HTML - once again nothing revolutionary. I also don't see it going any further than it already has gone (by the very role it is meant to serve, there is no need for it to expand).

[oracleguy]

If there are no revolutions in web development in the next 10 years I'll personally be a happy man. Lets not forget that 99% of web sites out there have still failed to properly grasp how to use HTML and CSS let alone any of the other possible technologies. Perhaps a period of stagnation is what is needed to fix this situation.

Well that is an interesting point which made me think, maybe what needs to happen is for browsers to start dropping support for older technology and being more strict when it comes to validness of the HTML/XHTML that makes up the page.

[jkd]

Well that is an interesting point which made me think, maybe what needs to happen is for browsers to start dropping support for older technology and being more strict when it comes to validness of the HTML/XHTML that makes up the page.

But that isn't economic. And validity isn't as important as people make it out to be. (It's the well-formedness that can be an issue.)

And what would making the rest of the web well-formed and valid actually accomplish? Part of the web's success was its ease of entry to wannabe-publishers (publishers in the sense of publishing information) -- one did not need to be an expert programmer to put something up for everybody else to see. Requiring such a strict syntax places a barrier and reduces the freedom of the Internet to only computer programmers. It might be easier to write a web browser, but I don't think the price is worth it.

Furthermore, I fail to see how a dead platform motivates anyone to go back and change what they have written. It's features which drive rewrites, and in the process of rewriting, it becomes a lot more logical to fix whatever was "wrong" to begin with.

[rpgfan3233]

Here is a page that urges developers to completely give up on IE, despite the fact that it holds 86% (at the time of the article's writing) of the market: http://www.nomoreiehacks.org/ IE is a major problem, in my opinion, but the suggestions presented in that article are not plausible. After all, businesses don't care what goes on as long as they can see their site in the way that is most comfortable to them. As for suggesting alternative browsers, a site is there to help advertise a business' offerings, not to advertise alternative browsers. Besides that, if a page doesn't work in the first place, how will users see that suggestion?

[VIPStephan]

If I may chime in (without claiming to know better than you gurus :))...
I think it's this feeling of "everything has been there already..." and I can totally see the point. Being a musician I can probably explain it from this point of view:

Development of music was always affected by tension and release (as music itself). Some people dared new, unconventional things and gained respect or not and then there were times where not many new things occured. Composers like Mozart, Bach, or Beethoven revolutionized the music of their time because there were musical or social conventions or restrictions they dared to break. Arnold Schönberg revolutionized the classical music with his works based on the twelve-tone technique (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-tone_technique) because this was something completely new and revolutionary.
Then... what a revolution was Bebop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebop) in jazz music because it broke with convention as did Modal Jazz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_jazz) and Free Jazz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Jazz)...
But after some time everything becomes customary and you aren't revolutionizing anything nowadays when you come to the stage with another "Giant Steps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Steps_%28composition%29)". And music has kinda grown like a tumor in the 70's and 80's with new musical styles every year. But also the society has changed to a point where everything was allowed and you couldn't revolutionize anything by breaking rules because there simply weren't any.
And how long is a pop star popular in these days? Who has made a real revolution in the last ten years? It's just like everything has been there already with the possibilities we have... And people are so used to new things that it's hard to evoke a revolution.

I guess it's much like that in computer science/web development. If some technology is quite new revolutions are "easy" to make... now, after about 16 years of the existence of HTML... what can we revolutionize with the current technology (hardware wise)? I think the next revolution will probably come with three dimensional computer screens/DOMs or "holograms". Who knows?

It's not like Beethoven thought "Hold on Josephine, lemme just finish revolutionizing music and then I'll join you at the dinner." or Herman Hollerith (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerith) (the founder of IBM) said to his fellow "Ey dude, I've just got a crazy idea. Wanna invent the computer and revolutionize the earth with me?" Revolutions come with new possibilities or needs and most of the time they take years to really revolutionize things (and we might not even notice).

But if you've got some really revolutionary idea maybe you have luck and can do something to revolutionize the internet? :)

Sorry for this huge and partly off topic essay... just wanted to express my thoughts for one time. :)

[jkd]

I like that music analogy. I think it fits very closely... :)

[mindlessLemming]

Rather than new groundbreaking technologies, I'm more excited about the push to embrace the simple elegance that made HTTP such a success--PUT, POST, GET, and DELETE. The web as a collection of information sources and processing services is where I think the focus should be going, especially since every new device now is HTTP aware, though they have HTML rendering engines of varying qualities. Forget the all-singing-all-dancing-page-based web, I'm excited about the transparent web.