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Where is the Web Going

May 7, 2010 9:02:10.000

Tim Bray has an interesting post up on where the web is headed, and he starts off with this as one of his points:

The HTML specification process is controversy-laden , immensely ambitious, and is attempting to boil at least one ocean. There is no guarantee of success, no matter how you choose to measure it.

I'd suggest reading the whole piece. This assertion in the middle deserves some thought though:

The discovery, in the early Web browsers, that reasonably-typeset text which embedded simple forms and hyperlinks, and came equipped with a “Back” button, hit the biggest 80/20 point ever in the history of User Interfaces, couldn’t have been predicted by anybody; but it’s as true today as ever.

That was certainly true once; it's getting to be less true all the time. A ton of the apps I use don't work with the back button well (or at all) - Gmail being one of them. The dividing line between "web app" and "app" has been blurring for some time, and it's getting more blurry as time goes by. I expect HTML5 (or whatever comes down the pike) to continue that trend

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posted by James Robertson

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