The Future of Web Applications

Web applications currently provide greater flexibility and more effective human interface than static Web pages. As client-side storage is added, Web applications and desktop applications become closer, although significant differences remain. The open standards (HTML, SVG, CSS, etc.) vie with proprietary systems (Air, Silverlight, etc.) for the presentation side. RDF, XML, JSON , SPARQL and SQL compete as data access techniques. There is a blossoming of code and widget libraries. On social networking sites, application portability and data portability are concerns of the day, for developers and users. We must ask ourselves in the long term, how we would like the Web application platform to evolve, and what facilities would be useful in the future.