The Web has already become an almost iconic cultural reference— ubiquitous and familiar. We think we know what it is by now. Your grandmother can now recognize a Web page—brochurelike displays of Times or Arial text, eye-grabbing graphics, and highlighted hyperlinks. What we need to remember, though, is that the Web as we know it now is a fleeting thing: Web 1.0. Its relationship to the Web we will be familiar with in years to come is roughly the relationship of Pong to The Matrix. The Web as we know it is essentially a prototype—a proof of concept. Now the concept—interactive content universally accessible through a standard interface—has proven so successful that a new industry is now set on transforming it, capitalizing on all the possibilities of that powerful idea. The Web we know now, which loads into a window on our computer screens in essentially static screenfuls, is an embryo of the Web as we will know it in not so many years.
The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are now beginning to appear, and we can start to see just how that embryo might develop. The first stages of mitosis have begun, and the cells of the organism have begun to differentiate. Now we can see that the defining thing about the Web won’t be any visible characteristic at all. The Web will be identified only by its underlying DNA structure—TCP/IP (the protocol that controls how files are transported across the Internet), HTTP (the protocol that rules the communication between computers on the Web), and URLs (a method for identifying files). As those technologies define its workings, the Web’s outward form—the hardware and software we use to view it—will multiply. On the front end, the Web will fragment into countless permutations with different looks, behaviors, uses, and hardware hosts. The Web will be understood, not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will still appear on your computer screen, transformed by the video and other dynamic media made possible by the speedy connection technologies now coming down the pike. It will also appear, in different guises, on your TV set (interactive content woven seamlessly into programming and commercials), your car dashboard (maps, yellow pages, and other traveler info), your cell phone (news, stock quotes, flight info), hand-held game machines (linking players with competitors over the Net), maybe even your microwave oven (automatically finding cooking times for the latest products).
The world of myriad, ubiquitous Internet-connected tools—often referred to as “Internet appliances”—has been long predicted. Till now, though, that world has been described vaguely, indicated by the term “Internet appliances” itself and a bit of hand-waving rather than any concrete product specs. Now the first generation of Internet appliances—Web-ready cell phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants)—has begun to appear. And while these devices are still pretty primitive, they do offer some clues to the likely future of the breed.
For designers, the first thing to notice is the different form factors already appearing. The kind of Web page you can display on a cell phone or Palm Pilot is a far cry from the kind you’d create for a computer monitor. The format is not only much smaller (think 2 inches, rather than 17 inches, of screen real estate), but onboard storage is either minimal or non-existent, and keyboards for alphanumeric information entry are usually missing. In fact, the hardware will be different from device to device; compare the interface of the Palm Pilot with that of the GameBoy, for instance. Do you have a 20-pixel, 200-pixel, or 2000-pixel screen width? Pen entry, joystick, or touch screen? Each device’s input and output methods will demand different interface designs. Besides the hardware differences, designers will also have to consider an ever-widening array of connection speed capabilities. Web pages meant to be viewed on full-size monitors or TV screens will soon be able to take advantage of high-bandwidth connections such as cable modems and DSL connections. Mobile appliances such as PDAs need to rely on much slower connections. The two-way radio planned for the Palm VII PDA, for instance, gets about 10 Kbps. While wireless speeds will likely see gains in the future, the chasm between wired and unwired speeds will likely remain wide, and both connection models will be important.
The lesson is inescapable: Web development—Web design, programming, and production—will split into fragments mirroring the fragmented Web appliance scene. The Web publishing community seems somehow to still be in denial of this reality. The W3C has published guidelines for using HTML 4.0 to create Web pages for mobile devices, advising designers to stay away from frames, scripts, complex tables, images, and other space-hogging elements. They recommend the use of HTML 4.0’s <MEDIA> tag to attach appropriate style sheets, tailored for the small screens and other limitations, to your Web pages. The reality is, though, that the days of one-size fits all pages are over (if they ever existed). No single set of pages can—or should—be created to fit all possible Web devices. You’d be foolish to use a Palm Pilot interface on a 36-inch TV screen or to try displaying MTV on a cell phone screen. Why imaging that a single Web interface might suite such disparate devices?
The initial signs bear out this hypothesis. The handful of Web-connected cell phones already on the market each have different display standards and interface models, leaving it in the hands of each service provider to produce content for its own subscribers. When 3Com announced its Internet-compatible Palm VII, it also announced a proprietary Web publishing format to support it, featuring an icon-based interface limited to simple queries and a pint-sized page format for publisher responses. The underlying technologies are the same as for what we might now call “traditional” Web pages, but the publishing format and interface is quite different. This initial chaos could be tamed, to some degree, over time, and the fight against it has already started. A W3C standards group, dubbed the WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) consortium has formed to begin developing display, interface, and production standards for mobile devices like cell phones and PDAs. Setting standards for phones makes a lot of sense, and cell phone makers have some incentive to do so. The existence of standards would both free them from the task of doing their own publishing and open the market to third-party publishers—leading to a profusion of content that would in turn sell more phones. Because of the hardware issues described earlier, though, it’s unlikely that standards set for cell phones would work well for PDAs. And for both those practical reasons and competitive reasons (the tendency of any company to try to differentiate its own products) we’re bound to see a proliferation of new Web publishing formats.
It’s too early—way too early—to say how many fragments Web publishing will finally break into. The field will be evolving for years to come, as new devices appear, cleaving to existing standards when practical and striking out on their own if it seems to provide competitive advantages. The process will doubtless be similar to the one we’ve already witnessed in the two-celled organism, the world defined by Netscape’s and Microsoft’s browsers. The two companies first strove for dominance by accentuating their browsers’ differences, then acceded to standards when doing so offered its own competitive advantages.
In the end, way down the line, some set of standards for different devices will probably be developed—say one for cell phones, another for game machines, and one for household appliances. The process will be long and unpredictable, though—an organic system of mitosis, mutation, and natural selection that we can only sit back and watch with wonder.