Looking forward to 2009

Warning This article was written over six months ago, and may contain outdated information.

2008 was pretty exciting on the web, wasn’t it? The continuing rise of social media, mobile internet, APIs, frameworks… it’s getting harder to keep up with it all.

I won’t be so bold as to make any specific predictions about the year ahead – more of the same is my best guess! – but here are a few articles I’ve read recently which have an eye on the future.

5 Exciting Things to Look Forward to in HTML 5

Don’t get too excited about the first point (‘new HTML elements that improve our ability to describe content’) as there’s no way for them to degrade gracefully in many browsers, but the rest are pretty interesting and – importantly – already being implemented.

SVG Is The Future Of Application Development

Maybe on the mobile web, where the SVG-compliant Safari and Opera (and perhaps Firefox/Fennec in the future) are commonplace, but IE doesn’t support SVG and perhaps never will.

Getting Real About Agile Design and Contract Killer

Although the digital sector seems pretty healthy at the moment, the global recession is bound to bite harder next year. These articles give some practical advice on how to make sure you don’t get bitten too.

Also: Browsers

Early 2009 should also see new releases of each of the major browsers: IE8, Firefox 3.1, Safari 4, Opera 10, and a bug-free version of Chrome; lots of new features to play with and – crucially – a standards-compliant base to develop on.

1 comment on
“Looking forward to 2009”

  1. I’m loving this blog. Anyway about the article. Yeah, 2009 is definitely going to be exciting. As a web developer I just want more people to use standards-compliant browsers and hopefully IE8 will support standards. I’ll also be looking forward to updates on MooTools, jQuery, Dojo, Prototype, and the rest of the Ajax frameworks.