The Web has been showing its age.
Superficially, it appears healthy: websites have grown more powerful and clever over the past decade. Unlike the sites of the 1990s, which mainly showed static text and images, sites in the 2000s could do things. We could manipulate a stick figure on a Google map and bring up photos taken at the real-world location. But beneath the surface, this "Web 2.0" era required a lot of tape and glue, because video and other multimedia elements often didn't work smoothly on basic Web pages.
To make everything come together, website developers needed help: they found it by turning away from HTML, the open programming standard that originally made the Web blossom. To get videos to play and animations to run, websites added proprietary programs to their sites--programs with futuristic-seeming names like Flash and Silverlight--and forced users to download a corresponding "plug-in" to run each one. That made websites complex and slow, which was annoying enough on a PC. But on mobile devices--the computing platform of the future--it was often unacceptable. After all, their screens are small and their connections apt to be uneven.
To read the full, original article click on this link: The Web Is Reborn - Technology Review
Author: Bobbie Johnson
