The future of web development

During a brief respite from dealing with some launching pains yesterday, I was talking with one of my coworkers about the future of web development. He's one of the rare ones around here who's a genuine web developer, not just a Java developer forced to make a website because that's what we need at the time.

We were discussing the new HTML5 logo and the potential that all the new technologies branded under this logo represent, and the kind of powerful kind of applications these technologies represent. Where the distinction between current "web applications" and thick, client-side applications gets completely blurred. And really, we're already at the point where the browser is powerful enough to be the runtime environment for a good number of simple applications. With the addition of WebGL and the audio interface, we're getting close to the browser being able to support an even wider number of applications.

It got me excited. I mean, really, that's the kinda thing I want to try out. I want to toy with these new technologies and see what I can build. Right now, I understand them in concept -- and a few of them I've even seen demos of. Hell, I've written some CSS3. But I still feel my web development brain stuck in a pre-HTML5 world. I still think of HTML pages as documents, things that I need to style to look good, and that I need to use javascript to move boxes around to make animation. The power of video tags and audio tags have not fully been realized. It's not intuitive for me to think that way.

But I want it to be. This stuff is cool. And I want to be good at building with it. 

That said, it sparked another series of different side projects I could do. This adds to my already long list of side projects I have already thought of, which I haven't actually attempted or haven't finished. My work is never done. Oh well.