Many of the layers and interfaces in a site don't stack perfectly and have cross-cutting concerns that are hard to reconcile. For example, with CSS and HTML the idea is to separate your presentation layer from your structure. However, there is a significant amount of cross-over. For example, order of content, which is presentation, is largely defined in HTML. (the order of columns in a table, the order of sections of your page, etc.) You can absolutely position divs in your page with CSS, but you are limited in how you do so.
All of this aside, there are major rendering issues with HTML. First is the lack of pixel perfect rendering and browser inconsistencies, which add significant frustration and development time for designers. The next issue is that HTML was designed for static content. Animating and dynamically changing large portions of the page, as the new sites do, appears choppy at best and may have visual flaws.
The success story
HTML has had enormous success as the premiere communication medium on the web. I just wanted to highlight its virtues and explain why I think it has been so successful.
- Hyperlinks: The defining concept of the web is the hyperlink - the idea that one HTML page can point to another
- Powerful/Extensible: As we've seen recently, with some clever use of CSS and Javascript you can do some pretty fancy things. With plugins such as flash and java applets you can do even more
- Human Readable, Low barrier of entry: You can pop open a text editor, type in some HTML and view it. You can copy this file to a server and serve it
- Open Standard: The fact that HTML is a standard that anyone has the right to implement a browser for is essential to its acceptance
The Essence of HTML
I want to look at the fundamental technological essence of HTML. Basically, you have a Client and a Server. The Server has some content, the Client wants to see it. HTML is the medium or language you use to describe the content. There are many hidden aspects to it, such as how a hyperlink works, what meta-data a site has, asynchronous communication, etc. However, I want to focus on the media aspect of HTML. (Audio-Visual)
There are two essential aspects to HTML as a media.
1. It's like a compression algorithm
If I want the client to see some text I could send it as an image. But it's far more effective to just send the ASCII characters and have the client's font engine render the text. Essentially, this is compression. I give a few parameters: the text, the font metrics (size, weight, family, etc.) and at the end I get my rendered text.
2. It has semantic meaning
Certain concepts within HTML gain semantic meaning within the client's computing environment. For example, screen readers can read the text. If I copy HTML into my word processor, the word processor translates it into it's own markup. I can also copy things like tables into my spread sheet program. The same thing goes for things like images. This interface to the rest of the user's computing environment is incredibly useful.
A blank canvas
So lets start talking about a new web medium. If we could start again, if we had a blank slate, what would we want, how would we design things differently?
From an idealistic point of view we want a blank slate, complete technological freedom. Just give me a accelerated 3D canvas with a primitive drawing API and I'll build everything on that foundation.
But why limit it to graphical freedom? Why not have complete freedom?
Imagine your browser had a library versioning system. When you visit a new site the page defines the libraries it needs and where they can be found. Any libraries a client does not have, it downloads. There would be a number of standard libraries most sites would use: font engines, image format rendering, etc. Imagine the possibilities: You could provide new image formats, new font engines and fonts, on the fly.
On the other hand, this would be complete technological anarchy. What's to limit the number of libraries? What are the security implications?
There's also the whole side issue of maintaining semantics within the web. However, I feel like this is actually fairly straightforward. It would be each library's responsibility to attach semantic data. The font engine would attack text semantics to its rendering. The image library would do the same.
The New Web
If this could be achieved you would have completely redefined the internet and desktop computing experience. Instead of firing up an application, you would go to a certain url. If done right such a standard would erase operating system barriers and become the defacto standard for software distribution.
You might say this sounds a lot like Java Web Start. I would say the goals are similar but the key is that such a system would be language agnostic. Not only language agnostic but future language compatible.
Let me go over a detailed example. Imagine I wrote a new scripting language called Ascript. I write its interpreter in C and compile it for a few different processors and package it according to some web library standards. I then write an application in Ascript. My application has a standard web header, which specifies the Ascript dependency. I put this application on my webserver. When I client visits the url, they download Ascript if they don't have it, then the browser launches my Ascript script with the downloaded interpreter.
There are a lot of issues to resolve at this point. What would the API be like? Would you have a direct interface to OpenGL? How would the user control application access? Maybe have dialogs such as "X wants to access your file system. Approve/Deny" How would the distribution work? Could you assist distribution with automated Bit Torrents? How would applications be organized? Would they have desktop/start menu icons? What other APIs are available? Where do you draw the line? Could you execute assembly?
I'll probably elaborate more on these ideas in the future.
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