The web, and what will happen to it

I've received a comment on a previous post, and when I began answering it, I found that I might as well make it a full post.

NewsBlaze says that in reality there is a large majority of surfers on the web that is using Internet Explorer. And by looking at statistics, he's right.

What I was hinting at was more a researchers stand – trying to acknowledge the present, but focus more on how to improve the state of things. As we all know the number of devices that enables us to be online has increased dramatically, and continues to do so. Judging by the massive awareness and demand for these devices, and my own experiences, there has been a huge demand for some sort of hardware, other than a computer, that could run “advanced” applications such as e-mail clients and calendars. And the need for syncronization between all theses devices is growing with the change.
But then comes the notion of the “never-ending-network”^©, meaning we can be online everywhere. If everywhere we are, we are able to connect to some sort of network, or in another way be online, what do we need apps and sync for? Shouldn't we rather use web apps to provide us with the information we need? If (when) we get to this point, it's essential that every web site/application displays and behaves the same across all devices, computers, projectors and event printable medias.
Implementing the above is quite a challenge, but I'm sure there will be soend a lot of time on it in the future. Especially now that Adobe is working on this new range of breathtaking application frameworks engines, including Flash (ActionScript 3.0), Flex, LiveCycle and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). And now that Microsoft has joined the battle for RIA's (Rich Internet Applications) with the release of Silverlight. And now the comming of Web 3.0 is being discussed. I sincerely hope that the above mentioned technologies will mature over the next couple of years, and then take over! By saying they need to mature, I mean that they still have a lot of issues, regarding the very topic of this post – clean website structure/markup – which need to be solved. But that is another post, maybe some oher day...


Anyway, NewsBlaze, I hope you can follow my chain of thought. I'm a firm believer that we will see a situation similar to my “never-ending-network”^© theory, and just want to start thinking about it, and having other people thinking about it.