You might remember my article about the future of applications and the offline/online mixin that we are currently seeing. What I wrote was mainly about the proprietary side. There are many developments being worked on in the open field.
First of all, what is missing from the current browsers to transform them into rich application framework? Here are some points I think are missing:
- Audio / video support
- 2D / 3D drawing capabilities
- Enhanced forms and form controls
- Enhanced network communication support
- Persistent storage
- Online / offline events
Many of these points are already part of Flash/Flex but Flash is proprietary software. You cannot use it in the way you want. It was not created in an open way with an open discussion with those interested. Recently, Adobe opened up its license in order to let competitors develop their own Flash player but it still remains a close environment.
There is one group working on those problems with an open discussion philosophy in mind. It is the WHATWG community. They are mainly working on the HTML 5 specification.
Some of the HTML 5 specifications are being implemented in the current and the next wave of browsers. One the of the interesting things I am seeing these days is the use of the canvas element to fill the 2D / 3D drawing capabilities point. There are experimental FPS shooters made using the canvas element. The creator of the excellent jQuery library created Processing.js, a port of the processing visualization language to Javascript. I downloaded Firefox beta 5 to have a look at those Processing.js demos. I must say that I was quite impressed.
Regarding the audio / video support point, I wish there would be more progress. There are is a new element for audio support called audio and there is a new element for video support called video in the HTML 5 specifications but there are some many interests, politics, patents and laws regarding this point that it will take a few years before it can be resolved I think. You can read the W3C blog about the video element issues.
The open standards had a big part in the success the web has had. I believe it will be the same for rich applications and the future.
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