Future of Web and Mobile: HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript

If somebody had asked me 5 years ago, what are the next big web technologies on the horizon ? What would my answer would have been?

AJAX, Flash or perhaps Silverlight ?

The scene has changed from then. Now its the HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript which are the future of web technologies. This change has come gradually due to some reasons:

  • Tremendous rise in popularity of Javascript: Few years back, developers used to hate write javascript code. Partially because its loosely typed and perhaps more because each browser has got its own JavaECMAScript implementation. Jquery project has greatly simplified the effort required in maintaining cross-browser client side script. And slowly, javascript is being loved by developers. One of the reason of this is change is due to emergence of standard coding design patterns in javascript. Earlier developers were unaware that object oriented concepts like classes, objects, encapsulation, inheritance could be applied to javascript. But now, these has become very standard design patterns. JavaScript is better than it’s ever been

    Have a look at these popular javascript based projects which have contributed to rise in popularity of this language.

    1. Jquery
    2. HeadJS
    3. KnockoutJS

  • Emergence of HTML5: W3C consortium has come up with new standard for HTML which includes advanced functionalities like local storage, audio and video. Since HTML5 is going to be uniquitous standard, it seems it is going to replace technologies like Silverlight and Flash.

  • CSS3: CSS3 further adds the power to HTML5.

  • Mobile: Perhaps one of the biggest push these three technologies (HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript) has got is in area of Mobile. More and more mobile frameworks (Android, IOS and WP7) are increasingly starting to use these technologies as the base for their front end.

  • Browser Extensions: The war of browser between IE, Mozilla and Chrome has resulted in browser extensions. These extensions are particularly popular in Chrome and Mozilla browsers. And guess what ? Writing a custom extension for these browser require skills in HTML and Javascript.

  • Windows 8: The next version of Microsoft Windows OS is going to use a new UI called Metro. And apart from using Managed code such as C# and VB.NET , you can create Metro Style apps in javascritp as well. See the article Building your first Windows Metro style app using JavaScript

It looks clear to me that HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript is going to be future for building rich UI apps on Web and mobile or perhaps even desktop. What do you think ?