HTML5 and the Future of the Universe

Web site people are always catching up. You get involved in an extended project and by the time you're done, they've changed the rules again and it's time to learn a new technology. I used to think this was a problem. Now I see it as a responsibility to manage the information of an ever expanding set of hardware devices that are becoming digital.

As these digital devices become of age, they mature into a web access point because of the value it adds to the device. Some devices like tablets are born with the ability to talk to the web at birth. Others, like DVD players, had to wait until they grew up.

HTML5 and CSS3 are expanding to fill the needs of the digital appetites of these new devices. As we innovate to market test a device at every screen size possible from phone to tablet to TV, the older development technologies will continually be updated until they break. So far, HTML and CSS are holding their own. CSS not so much. Even the old dog, JavaScript, is doing well but has some sturdy jQuery and CoffeeScript crutches.

The raft of programming languages not originally focused on the web that try to manage that environment push the simple text retrieval process to be more app like. In their desire to improve the unique asynchronous request-response communication model, they, in my mind, will eventually destroy it. Face it, it's slow. You can do faster communication with AJAX which is why you see Google using so much of it on their web apps. It's why jQuery Mobile designed their GUI library for speed with AJAX so much that it's the primary communication model that tolerates the web request model.

Now a newer model of finer grained I/O control in JavaScript is starting to appear called the WebSocket API. Did you not see this coming? It's not the end until each language has a way to use a simple library of functions/methods to talk to any device of your choice.

Languages are shifting little in popularity. A recent TIOBE trend announcement showing that the iOS platform language of choice, Objective-C, has been the faster gainer over the last two years to take the #3 spot on the chart, is the only major change. With Java trending downward and losing the lead to C, a venerable stalwart, I'm not seeing where anybody is picking up the slack. C# is on a slow trend upwards but not that much. Even php is losing ground.

My guess is that JavaScript is picking up the slack from reading language popularity articles. You can run a survey of projects on StackExchange and Github and find out that JavaScript has the top ranking there. Hacker News put JavaScript in the top three as well with Python and Ruby taking the top spots. Even job rankings on Dice.com show JavaScript in the top three to get a better sense of real world usage. Book sales from O'Reilly put JavaScript at #2 showing a mix of business and hobby use.

The next step for JavaScript would be to revive the server side version of the language and make it as available as php is for Apache. Then the major languages would write APIs to talk to JavaScript and we would have a programming interface for the web. Oh, yeah, and somebody do something in JavaScript to make CSS easier to work with. LESS is a good start.

So, if you are a web person, the future of the web looks like it centers on web application development and JavaScript is taking center stage. APIs will be promulgating and JavaScript/jQuery/minor language support plug-ins will be promoted. One of the APIs that is next on my bucket list is YQL. I think with the first book out on YQL in a few months from O'Reilly, we'll see an interest in mining the data of the web from JavaScript languages.

Excuse me now, I have to get back to the future and read about what's coming so when I start working again I won't be too far behind.



By: Doug Hoff