If you want to be a native app, you have to start acting like one.
My take away from HTML5DevConf about the future of web development.
Two weeks ago I attended HTML5DevConf. It was my first conference and I found it to be a great experience. I learned a lot about the current state of web development and picked up a few tricks and tools that I will be applying back at the office. I also listened to a lot of ideas about what the web might look like next year, or in a couple years from now. These ideas were exciting because they were incredible stories of what might come, but also because the people telling me about them were people who are actually capable of making it happen. People involved in making an open web, large corporate backers, and people who work on and with important technologies every day. Here is what I heard and what I’m excited about.
Web Apps
Major companies are putting a lot of resources behind making web apps easier to develop. Web components are a huge step forward in making it easy to write complex applications and tools that can be reused quickly and effectively. Pushes are being made to make web apps first class citizens across all platforms. Tools are being made and released to allow web apps to send native push notifications, let sites cache specific data to resume where a user left off and to enable the ability to create a true “offline” mode.
JavaScript
JavaScript will be around for a long, long time. It has become part of the web in a way that will be difficult to ever separate. The libraries people are making and open sourcing are more incredible than ever: 3D libraries, service workers, front-end frameworks like React and Polymer and backend services through node.js and it’s huge, self-sustaining, ecosystem.
CSS
CSS was the biggest question I had leaving HTML5DevConf — it will obviously play an important role, but right now it’s in an awkward place. New standards like web components are bringing back the importance of CSS blended into your HTML source. This is an uncomfortable truth for developers who have worked hard to get CSS out of their HTML for years and now have a clean separation of code. The fact that web components have the ability to ignore outside styling makes it much more difficult to ensure a consistent style across a site. That said, the future looks like one where we will organize code by component and not by language.
Conclusion
I am excited for engineers and developers moving forward. We may finally have the technology, support and interest necessary to make and deploy a single app with native capabilities to everyone. Better yet, we will be able to do so with the freedom of open standards and open source code. I am looking forward to seeing the amazing apps people will be able to make. I only hope that this movement continues to push what we can do with technology and, by proxy, what technology can do for us.
