The Web Revolution

The larger part of you (visitors) are going to simply cruise the net, day after day, downloading updated browsers and appreciating the beauty of the web while tapping on the vast amounts of organized information available. For some of you, however, the web is a never-ending pain of cross-browser issues involving Javascript, CSS and dysfunctional Div Tags. If life wasn't already hard for you, the introduction of AJAX didn't help at all. Everyday, there are now new issues, new cross-browser problems to fix, and WebServices to deal with.

A good, modern website usually contains/requires the following:

• HTML (or XHTML - most of us have switched to XHTML nowadays)
• CSS (2.0. CSS 3.0 is coming out pretty soon)
• JavaScript (Call it JScript, JavaScript or ECMAScript - we're currently at the third version of the language. The fourth one is coming soon.)
• AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML)
• Server-side code (Whatever language you're familiar with - JSP, ASP. PHP, ASP.net)
• Database code (SQL queries, stored procs - that depends on your DB)
• Flash (With Actionscript 2.0)
• Accompanying WebServices for JavaScript and/or Flash.
  

If you're planning to go into Web Design, think twice. With every single day, the web design business is getting more and more specialized. You can't be a jack of all trades. I, for example, can work my way around most of the technologies required for a website, but I won't ever match with someone who has worked closely with JavaScript and AJAX. Nor do my CSS skills match those of a talented web designer.

The problem with the web is that it has been built upon HTML. Years and years have gone by, but the core has remained the same. To "improve" the browsing experience, layers and layers of new technologies have been constructed on top of sad little HTML pages to make the web what it is today. It's like trying to make a car made out of wood, and running on steam fly. The amazing thing is that it IS flying.

I personally think that it's time to introduce a new format. Something totally different. On the client side, (X)HTML, CSS and ECMAScript need to be unified. And new graphical capabilities need to be added to browsers (which would cut out the need for Flash), as well as support for direct server communication (for streaming), while allowing the code to "mutate" and change itself. And yeah, pop-ups need to be killed.

On the server side, one single type of code should be able to generate the business logic, the presentation layer, query databases and at the same time deal with direct client communications to provide painless streaming functionality.

That's it! We have our requirements. Let's hope the W3C takes note of this blog post, and starts another one of their committee to study this case.

This Web Revolution of mine might not happen now... but I have high hopes for humanity, and the internet.