Today's developers are already hard at work on a new development that can change the entire web as we know it.
It's known as HTML 5.
0, and some recent statements about it have called into question the dominance of content-heavy browser plugins like Microsoft Silverlight.
Since video has developed into such an essential block of the modern web experience, it can be weird to be reminded of the fact that most of the content we view comes to us through a developer addon.
There's not really anything fundamentally incorrect with this fact, for the most part.
Defining Rich Content in a Standard Way But the web is premised upon open, interchangeable standards.
At this moment, all the standards for flash video are controlled by Adobe.
We can say there's almost no chance of Adobe going bust, the important thing is that having each 'rich' web information moving through the plug-in of a for-profit developer pushes against the open ideas that constitute the internet itself.
So HTML 5.
0 has chosen itself to resolve this problem.
At the moment, groups of web developers are hard at work hammering out a rich HTML standard for the www, something that can define rich content and allow videos and other multimedia content to be positioned just there in the HTML standard, not passed through browser plugins.
Why This Is Important to Designers This is important because the world wide web of the moment could appear quite different in the coming decades.
Although a good amount of the rich components will surely mirror the proper qualities of the rich plug-ins we're used to, the amount of changes achievable in any browser shall go way past that.
If you take a quick peek at what organizations like Google have managed to do with contemporary HTML coding (think of how fluid Google Maps feels), and all the creative technologies that have been put into our web browsers, think about a fundamentally new layer of possibilities beyond that.
Should Designers Start Learning HTML 5.
0 Today? In all probability not as soon as we'd all hope.
Web standards demand a very lengthy time to create and integrate, as they have to be entirely universal, accessible, and work properly across all standardized web browsers.
It's just like inventing a new language, and this example is certainly going to be the most complex yet.
The majority of sober guesses put the time-frame for full, rich HTML 5.
0 standardization somewhere way in the future, even ten years.
While elements of the protocol will become used way before then (some are already being adopted as I type this), the full embrace by all browsers, spanning all platforms, is just too unwieldy and demands too much work to happen quickly.
What the Big Guys Think Publicly, they aren't too worried.
In private, who can tell? Press releases from all three browser plug-in companies, there shall always be a place for rich plug-in experiences, and constructing an entire brand on one competency (let's say, flash serving video) is not a 100% way to make money to start.
By the time the HTML 5.
0 standard becomes widespread, addon developers will have had several years to create enhanced advancements that will not be matched by the new protocol, and we'll likely be in the same game anew.