Every week I see some articles discussing web app development, and 99% of those only talk about manipulating HTML. It is as though web applications were only about publishing, whereas the way the web serves people today has largely evolved beyond publishing. As popularity would have it, most people involved in web development, the publishing side of it that is, have no formal background in publishing.
As far as I can see, there are lots of W3C and other open initiatives that strive to move forward web standards. W3C HTML groups seem particularly focused on publishing, as in the modern day version of what used to be print publishing (Gutenberg like). When I see talks about semantic HTML, I only see document oriented standards, but nothing seriously useful from an application architecture perspective. OWL doesn’t appear often in the popular architect and developer forums that I frequently visit, the more I look into OWL, the more it reminds me of the way CORBA went. OASIS is very heavily XML focused, which to me is one extra indirection from the basic concepts we manipulate when discussing applications. I tend to think of OASIS as the corporate web world, large companies trying to find common grounds, a bit less about pure and lean application architecture. I don’t see much else popular W3C efforts pushing application standards forward.
Numerous communities have thrived on the many shortcomings of web app development, and that’s a blessing. On the data presentation side, you have some thriving JavaScript frameworks such as jQuery, Emberjs, Angularjs Backbonejs, D3, and many others. These aren’t standards, but I wonder if W3C should just extend itself an bring in these communities somehow (I’m thinking of HTTP 2.0 for example, the way it relates to Google’s SPDY). Beyond this three’s not much else happening with any significant momentum.
If web browsers are only good at manipulating HTML assets, then it would probably be useful to have a new platform for web powered applications in general with HTML manipulation as just a subset of its functionality. There’s been a couple of products, Flock was one, but they didn’t really catch on. I don’t see much else happening in the way of truly facilitating web-enabled applications. This is leaving the field to only publishing oriented experiences. Ubuntu has taken an interesting approach that, at least fits in the way I’ve long envisioned web powered applications. The Web of Things could have been such next-gen platform, if only it didn’t brand itself as hackers’ and tinkerers’ Toy?
For the time being, only web publishing seem to get most attention, that’s where the money goes. We might as well learn a bit about publishing, the blending of apps thinking and publishing concepts may yield new kind of experiences that would enrich the web.