I was reading Wired the other day and about two-thirds of the way through (page 125 to be exact) Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief, announced that the web is dead! Once I’d got over feeling bad about not realising the web was feeling under the weather in the first place, I had a dig around to see what everyone else thought, turns out it’s sparked quite a debate.
Anderson states that ‘Within five years… the number of users accessing the Net from mobile devices will surpass the number who access it from PCs.’ Perhaps not impossible but a bold statement I feel.
Whilst I agree that one of the most noticeable shifts in the world of pixels has been the move from the ‘open web’ to platforms that only use the internet for transport, but not the browser for display, it’s worth remembering that these trends tend to happen in phases.
Remember how ‘the browser’ took over everything, then developers demanded more options therefore moved to apps… but the browser will again overcome the apps distinguishing features and the technicalities they present and so the browser will keep coming back to provide the support. What most internet surfers don’t grasp is that it is in fact made up of several separate components of which the World Wide Web is just one application.
So is it really all moving to a post-HTML environment?
(I won’t mention the irony of how Wired actually published this on the website before I received my subscription… oops!)
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It’s not dead just evolving. That article sparked a lot of debate about Apps vs ‘open’ web, I wrote a bit about it also. You’re right that browser ue/ux on mobile will improve and address the app imbalance as it were
true, I believe so too, I had a dig around your blog and stumbled upon this post which I think is really interesting: http://www.markkelly.net/blog/2010/8/23/all-our-apps-must-die.html not sure if that’s the one you refer to in your comment but I’m putting up here for anyone else that finds this topic worth thinking about
yep that’s the post – I should have actually linked to it
Thanks for checking that out and linking to it!