The death of HTML?

It will come eventually. HTML is not a graphical language. It is a simple markup language. Can you imagine anyone in the year 3000 still using HTML?

It is interpreted by some crappy pieces of software called browsers. Most of which do it slightly differently.

Basically the end of HTML will come when someone invents an app lets call it WWW 2.0 which uses the same HTTP to load pages but not pages of *.html but pages of something else lets call them *.pages.

Perhaps these pages will simply be bitmaps which can be displayed the same on any device. Everything rendered in the cloud and sent to you.

Perhaps each page will be more like a room file and you'd move about these rooms in 3D.

Maybe they will encode holographic data.

Since websites are oldschool and apps are newschool, the language of the internet will change from HTML to some gaming language or scripting language. But which one? (Maybe once Unity brings out its new GUI new internet all pages will be unity files)

If you could reinvent a language for sending text and graphics, video and interactive content to another person over broadband (not limited to slow connections) how would it be different? The only requirement is that there is a way to move from one page to another say with hyperlinks, portals, or wormholes or something.

I want to invent an app to revolutionise the internet and kill HTML dead.

I think one problem is that although apps are better than webpages they require a lot of time to download unlike webpages and there aren't hyperlinks between apps (except for links to the store where you can download a new app). There needs to be a shift where apps can be streamed like webpages.

 

An app can actually stream DLLs, external packages, and run on the fly if setup that way.

I like your idea about the bitmaps

 

Yeah, maybe websites will become like OnLive and just stream bitmaps or video streams. And all interactions like mouse clicks will just be sent to the cloud to be dealt with and then a new Bitmap sent down.

Hmm... you got me thinking. It would be like an internet of streamed video games linked together with hyperlinks.

So the browser part of the app all it has to do is display a bitmap or video stream and send input information to the cloud. It should be a video format that is optimised for example if only a portion of the stream gets changed it only has to send that bit.

Everything else will be done in the cloud. Now I have to think about what kind of language will the backend be written in. If it even matters. Perhaps just a specification of what it must do.

Also, the advantage of HTML is that its easy to edit to make new webpages. But it's not really THAT easy to write HTML. It would be better to construct webpages in a WYSIWYG fashion like minecraft.
I think you could have an HTML renderer in the cloud that renders the same HTML to everything if you chose to use it. But you could just as easily use other ways to render things such as PDF.

 

Yeah. But I don't think Silverlight was a big enough leap away from HTML. It is still a sort of XAML text based syntax. At least Flash offered something entirely new. You could have an internet based entirely on SWF files with hyperlinks in them for example. Or you could have an internet based entirely on PDFs with hyperlinks in them. I'm want to break away from text based editing entirely. Looking forward to where we edit things more visually.

 

So my model so far is:

Content Viewing


[Back end in the cloud: Software running: An AAA video game, a PDF, an HTML renderer, a spreadsheet, a video]
|
[Middle end: Renders the output to a video stream in a variety of standard sizes and formats]
|
[Front end: Client receives HD quality video stream game, website or document].


[User clicks and touches sent back to the cloud for processing.]


Content Creation
For content creation, kind of the same but the creation software is in the cloud too:

[Back end in the cloud: A desktop publisher, a game maker (like Unity, or Unreal engine), a video editor, a music editor]
|
[Middle end: Renders the output to a video stream in a variety of standard sizes and formats]
|
[Front end: Client receives HD quality video stream].


So for this model to be successful may have to wait for a time when broadband is so cheap and powerful we can use Unity in the cloud (any plans for this Unity? ) and also edit movies and videos in the cloud.

So yeah, its basically like OnLive (before it collapsed) with everything in the cloud - but with added hyperlinks. Maybe these pages will be named like index.stream instead of index.html
So, yeah, an HTML renderer in the cloud will just be one of various ways to render text to send to the client. Any other proprietary WYSIWIG software could be used as you don't have to worry about having the right browser to render it as all you have to render is video streams.

Hmm... I don't know if I've solved the problem or just brushed it under the carpet!

 

in the year 3000, I doubt the human race will exist, let alone html.

 

Do you know something we don't?

 

I think with today's broadband speed this is too expensive an idea. But I may make a version that instead of streaming bitmaps, streams pages of ASCII. A bit like ceefax. Perhaps a 64 x 36 array of characters (including some graphics characters) at 24FPS which would be about 400Kbit/s.
I bet you could make some quite good games with that and display lots of websites even Wikipedia. It would be a start anyway. You might even be able to display some very very low quality video! Or stream Dwarf Fortress. Or spectrum games.

I will call it the Streaming WYSIWIG ASCII Browser or SWAB. (Suggest a better name!) I wonder if I could make it in Unity or would it contravene the license?

It will have its own content creation system in the cloud for creating pages.

This is a good brainstorm! Imagine that. An ASCII version of OnLive.

How could I make it?
Say you wanted to program in PHP. SWAB calls mypage.php?userid=000&mouseDown=true&mouseX=23&mouseY=45 every 1/24 of a second. The PHP checks if this is a new user, if so, start a new process otherwise go to the next step in the game loop and output the ASCII.
Not sure exactly how the PHP could run hundreds of games/pages simultaneously. I'll have to read the cloud documentation I suppose. Something to do with starting processes.

Again, not sure I've solved anything if rather than HTML you are just using PHP! Apart from solving the rendering on different browsers being different. But I feel happier programming PHP than just using a mark-up language.

 

I don't think HTML will die - it'll evolve though, to a point where you won't be able to tell the difference between HTML and a native app.

I'm predicting we'll see more app-like websites (ie: websites design the look and feel like an app) over the next few years - the difference between apps and websites will be smaller and we'll start to see "installable" websites that work offline.

All of the major browsers are working towards standards now, even IE - it'll take time, but once the closer these browsers get to meeting those standards, the better HTML-based websites will become.

As Superpig said, the majority of users of the web are machines - the use of HTML allows things like embedding previews when sharing something on Facebook, or pinning images on Pinterest, or searching for articles/tutorials using Google - all of which would not be possible without the HTML-based format.

I'd expect that this reason alone is a major factor in the death of both Flash and Silverlight.

And to your comment: "But it's not really THAT easy to write HTML." - it comes with experience and hundreds of thousands of developers would disagree with that statement. There's a reason why the majority of web developers don't use tools like Dreamweaver or WYSIWYG tools - it's actually easier, faster and cleaner to write it by hand.

 

Hmm maybe this is what I need: http://aws.amazon.com/appstream/

Not sure my idea would work though unless everyone used this. Or I hosted everyone in the world's websites!


Well for the sake of argument lets say everyone IS using this. What is the missing ingredient? Hyperlinks between the various apps using appstream! And a generic browser to consume appstream content. Then it would be a self contained universe.

So maybe what I need to make is an app-browser that consumes generic appstream content (and other ones not from AWS). And create a generic way of talking with each app stream app with mouse, keyboard input etc. jeez. It's hard to reinvent the internet!

 

I don't know that html is going anywhere anytime soon, but things are slowly evolving toward `full applications` and it won't be long before it's normal to target a `web browser` as just another application platform.

 

Considering there are billions, literally billions of webpages that use some form of HTML, it's never going to completely go away - only evolve. Modern HTML is nothing like the HTML I first started using in 1993.

 

I've thought of a better idea.

Well that's what they said about books before the internet was invented. "There are billions of books. Nothings going to happen to them." Now they're all uploaded onto the internet in digital form. Same with HTML. It'll all be uploaded onto the Next Big Thing in another form.

 

Not gonna happen.

There's too many multibillion dollar companies with invested interest in keeping the web HTML based for a very long long time.

HTML is fast, its simple, its easy to read, and its very light weight. Now with the advances of HTML5 and beyond, its hard to beat.

I think you are living in a fantasy world.

There are more paper books now than there ever was. Especially since you can print and self publish a paperback book for very low cost.

Also you do realize a very large portion of the human population doesnt even have access to clean water and constant electricity, so they wont be using digital books. Paper books are never going to vanish like you think they will. Uploading all books to a digital format and eliminating paper books will be a disaster waiting to happen. If something happened to all the digital copies and if they were all completely eliminated, and if there were no paper books you would instantly send humanity back into the stone age.

So to make all books digital and never make the equivalent paper books would be completely the stupidest thing imaginable.

 

What's wrong with HTML? It's not lightweight compared to binary formats, but It's human-readable and it's manipulation supported by the most popular programming language today(that would be Javascript). In today's open software/open standards world, it's hard to imagine a next big thing unless it's an iteration of today's existing solution.

I guess, if anything, the next big thing may be improvements to javascript or possibly new languages in the browser, especially if that asm.js stuff doesn't work out.

 

There will be some form of a document formatting language that likely got its parentage/influence/reaction from HTML. The idea of XML, XAML, and a few other markup languages is all based around the same idea. Unless there is some weird content method that doesn't consist of a header, content, attributes, and manipulation, we will always have some form of a descriptive document. Even if you look at most file types, they all have relatively similar structures. Even TCP/IP is in that format. If you really want to consider something groundbreaking, look at the Internet2, SPDY, and all the work and failures that have gone into trying to trying to replace/fix/improve TCP/IP. It's a well documented and flawed protocol that is vastly more important than HTML.

For what it's worth, I think you are completely forgetting about the power of local hardware vs cloud hardware. While not everyone can afford the latest Intel i9-6400 with 8000 gigaquads of XDDR-32 RAM, relatively decent hardware is quite accessible. Look at how popular and widespread the PS2 was/is!!

When network bandwidth is wide enough to support the entire world at a latency that is as fast as (or faster than) the data transfer circuitry inside a local machine for truly real time jobs, then Cloud computing as a computational assist will be able to benefit everyone. Until then, projects like SETI@Home, Stanford's Folding@Home, Bitcoin mining, and other distributed platforms will likely be looking at our local hardware rather than a single supercomputer. Also take a look at the latency those platforms typically are looking at... between 4 hours and months.

If I told you, I'd have to neuralyze you. All right, Beatrice, there was no alien. The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from...

 

HTML is here to stay, period. Bitmap streaming and external rendering are terrible ways to replace HTML as it will actually prevent more people from experiencing the sites, due to the amount of bandwidth it takes and the latency issues introduced. The amount of overhead a streaming solution would introduce is extreme compared to the current nature of only receiving code that is then interpreted.

Now, what will happen in the future is a new common scripting language being adopted that can replace HTML on specified sites, this language would allow low level access to the computers hardware, but this cannot happen untill a common security standard is in place.

If you look at things like emscripten that allows for normal C++, C# and other language to be converted to Javascript, then you can see that we have already gotten very far towards replacing HTML, CSS and so forth as the main design production languages.

I myself have recieved training in building web applications through PHP, Javascript, CSS and so forth, but while i think it's a complete mess to work with, it's just the reality we live in right now. HTML is extremely efficient, but everything is read in different ways by different browsers and the more progressive Google and Mozilla are at adapting different technologies, the more segmented the browser world becomes.

HTML will most likely die in a natural way when the next big thing hits the internet like Flash is currently doing, but not for a long long time.

 

haha this would be awesome - but... never gonna be all like that lol

lmao you are crackin me up dude

You know what your either completely genius or crazy, but either way with the shift towards "the cloud" and having things live serverside these days, it really could go that way soon. I could see google opting to prevent piracy and cheating through some sort of app delivery system, that simply loads content into memory out of some mass chain of app servers. So, just maybe your right! However I could reallyyyyy not see HTML itself going anywhere anytime soon. Perhaps new formats of HTML, with more WYSIWYG oriented design (like if dreamweaver worked like I expected it to work haha) instead of code centric design. Again though couldn't happen quickly, perhaps before 3000

 

Rendering bitmaps would not allow word searching or copy and pasting of text for other purposes such as cobbling research docs together or cut and pasting code snippets. Ergo the text/image/sound/video needs separation in the presented document which is why they were marked up to begin with. In the future you will also be receiving and generating holographs. So what is the issue? The creating of the markup language for the document to be viewed as laid out by the author.

I could see a browser engine that allows the creation of a document and it's constituent parts to be rendered as wysiwyg. It could parse lines and paragraphs of text by simply looking at the block of text, the font and size. So instead of marking up a block of text the computer parses the block of text, it's font, size, color and any bold or underlined or oblique, italics etc..The same with video and images and audio, where it parses the header for the media, its placement on a page and the surrounding elements. The page itself would be dynamically grid based so resizing of the document by the user would be automatic and resemble the original in visual flavor and contextual sequencing. There would be no need for a markup language being used by the creator as the actual layout and media types would be pre-parsed for delivery. Call it .wysl for what you see language. Beyond the web this style of document could be used universally with no special editor or markup language. The document engine itself does all the heavy lifting under the hood.

 

That idea is very intriguing and interesting.
An internet(or more practically a significant portion) based completely on unity3d scene files as pages.
Maybe we will even have a Unity 'browser' tailored exclusively to read pages like these

 

Yet there are still books, aren't there? And more are printed every day. As someone else said, there are probably more being printed than any other time in history. Not to mention the trillions that already exist. They ain't goin' anywhere!

 

What's wrong with HTML?

To me sounds like the OP doesn't like coding.

Html is not difficult to learn and the way the web is structured makes a lot of sense. If you want a visual page builder along the lines of the unity editor there are webapps that do that already.

The internet is not only HTML. There's also Javascript, CSS and whatever server side language you're using. This makes a lot of sense from a MVC point of view. It's all separated. The structure, the logic and the visual aspect.

And there's no need for new 'graphical language' since WebGL is on the horizon.

I agree with what others said, I dont think HTML/CSS/Javascript are going anywhere any time soon. It's probably going to evolve over time.

Honestly the future the OP describes sounds like a nightmare for web devs.

 

I second that.

 

I still use HTML for editing my stores on ebay ect, and for putting job posts on indieDB I am pretty sure there are other people doing the exact same thing. HTML is not dead yet. It will die eventually, it's a bit like the PS2 its dead but, it's not dead yet, if you get what I mean.

 

Anyone in this thread who is going "maybe all webpages could be made in Unity" or anything similar is completely forgetting how awful flash pages were in the early 2000s.

 

Google VRML, this was tried, didn't go over well

The "language of the web" has already shifted from just HTML, it is HTML/CSS/Javascript. Javascript is a steamroller lately and gaining popularity not only as the language in the browser but to a lot of server side stuff with Node.js. Probably "the" language to target/get familiar with as a web developer, it is everywhere and can do pretty much everything you've listed.

 

Yeah, weird there is no generic unity-player for mobile that could run Unity games which itself could be self-contained network. I suppose that's due to capitalism as it would bypass various app-store laws. I suppose the closest thing is WebGL.

Hmmm..... Maybe WebGL is the Next Big Thing then. You could create your 2D webpages in it as well I suppose.


What do you think?
Client Side: WebGL
vs
Server Side: Streaming Media

Which one will win? Maybe a combination of the two.

Perhaps it will be optional. e.g. a webpage contains WebGL which can either be rendered in the cloud and sent back or rendered on the client side. Best of both worlds.

 

If you have interests outside gaming you'd know they are still many very popular forums and websites more popular than Unity's forums that still look like they are using HTML out of the 1990s. They don't need or want tech designed to deliver entertainment to their computers. They get their entertainment away from the computer and television.

You don't need high tech (of course 1990s style forums was high tech once) to post a picture of a plant or to ask for advice on gardening and some many other things. Pinterest is popular but hardly a suitable replacement for those type forums. These forums have people from all over the world not just Britain, California, or suburbia.

 

WebGL is the immediate future I think.

 

Here's an idea which removes all the layout mark-up from HTML and leaves just the text markup. Based on the idea that a good layout for website should align with a grid. It makes it very clear and simple IMO. You get the best of both world's. A visual representation of the layout plus text markup.

file: index.newhtml

Code (JavaScript):

1. Layout(cells=16x16,width=64){
2.             TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
3.             TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
4.             TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
5.     aaa   bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
6.     aaa   bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
7.           --------------------
8.           cccccccccccccccccccc    dddd
9.           cccccccccccccccccccc    dddd
10.           cccccccccccccccccccc    dddd
11.           ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~    dddd
12.           cccccccccccccccccccc    dddd
13.           --------------------    dddd
14.           eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee    dddd
15.           eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee    ~~~~
16.           ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~    dddd
17.           eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee    dddd
18.  
19.    fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
20. }
21. T:image(title.gif)
22. a:image(chapter1.gif)
23. b:text("Welcome to my webpage")
24. c:text("Hi, welcome to my webpage. Find more about it <a href="more.html">here</a>")
25. e:text("I hope you like my <i>amazing</i> webpage")
26. d:flash(advert.swf)
27. f:text("Terms and conditions apply")

The symbol ~~~ just means the square is expandable.

Obviously you could implement this in javascript but it would't be accessible by search engines. This would remove most of my objections to HTML.

 

You don't need js for that, that's just plain html/css. I'm not understanding the problem you are trying to solve here, anything that is as simple as what is listed above does not satisfy the demands of complex layouts. You can use a visual html/css tool and do the above in about 10 seconds if you don't want to type out the code.

 

What in hell makes that more legible than HTML? Specially HTML5 markup which is much more descriptive. Honestly, I'm failing to see what you think is so terrible about HTML.

 

not going to comment on the whole abcdef .. example thing posted above.. , but what I would like to see vanish is css, they can move all that layout logic into a good central javascript api everyone uses and make the scripting language support be manditory in browsers. welcome to the future

 

Because you can look at it and visually see where everything go's. It's like designing a room for a game with a text editor. I admit its not brilliant. But by glancing in a CSS file can you really tell me you could sketch out the webpage? Maybe some people think in words other people think in pictures. Try desining a level for Zelda with CSS and you can see the difference.

My idea was to take the basic way we design the layout for a game like Pacman in a text editor and apply it to webpages. The different letters a,b,c are just marking out boxes. The same as using DIVs.

 

This is truly a terrible idea. This is even worse than html for gaming, since you are doing a lot of round trips to the server for something as simple as turning.

But lets ignore games for a second, streaming media means the client receives a pre rendered image, which makes your site unreadable to search engines, unreadable by screen readers (no accessibility), and you cannot even search for text in your page with an Edit -> Find, or cut & paste text.

It means orders of magnitude more bandwidth, sending pixels takes a lot more bandwidth than sending markup text even if the text was uncompressed (most sites do compression). This makes it very slow for phones in particular.

Rendering server side means that the server needs to do a lot more work, and you will require additional CPU and memory for this. The key to scalability is to offload as much work as possible to the clients.

You will have to pay for the extra bandwidth for your servers.

Something as simple as moving your mouse over a button, and it highlighting means a round trip to the server, so your web site will seem sluggish. Regardless of bandwith, latency will kill you, and we have the speed of light as nature's speed limit.

Streaming media is such a non starter, it is only useful for video or music (youtube, netflix, etc) that does not require interaction, for anything else, it is crazy talk.

 

You guys realize images can infact be analyzed and text can be extracted from them. Granted, when the OP mentioned streaming bitmaps I envisoned images that also contained information about the text that would still make it easy for browsers to parse. Perhaps something like vector graphics of a sort. But yeah- text can be easily handled. (You can even store info about the Text at each affected pixel or in the file header, etc)

Thing is- like someone else pointed out, powerful chips are becoming cheaper and cheaper. Your average teenager has a cell phone that can handle processing. So there is probably no need for Cloud for this purpose.

Anyway this is just some quick thoughts

 

What I always think about is Dr Know from the flm AI. This is the future of the internet. Definitely HTML is dead by this time. It's an interesting vision of the future but I can't see how its based much on HTML and CSS!.

 

That's a non-starter, because web pages aren't supposed to be fixed in place. They should be flexible, so that people can enlarge text or change the screen orientation (phones/tablets) and it will reflow and still work. It makes a lot more sense to just describe web pages in a markup language than to try designing them like they're a magazine ad. I'm sorry, but goldbug is right and the streaming idea simply doesn't make any sense and doesn't solve any problems.

--Eric

 

I would happily replace html with xaml

webpages can die in a fire tbh. Too much inconsistency between browsers.

IE6 FTW! (said no developer EVER)

 

HTML Dead - Enquiring Minds Want To Know.