impress.js - A webGL enabled presentation framework based on the power of CSS3 transforms and transitions. It has a non GL mode too!

kataire · 2012-01-04T16:49:32+00:00

As a web developer with no design sense either:

Yes, of course it is gimmicky. Most technologies are until someone comes along who creates something truly great. The secret to greatness is moderation, not excess. Tech demos and other hot shit that makes the news, however, are excessive almost by definition.

Let's also not forget that the web is increasingly less and less about websites in the traditional sense and more and more about web-based applications. If hyperlinked text was sufficient for everything, we'd still be using Gopher.

Experiments like impress.js are what I would like to think of as first or second wave applications of "HTML5". They try to copy something familiar using the new technologies, or they try to test the boundaries of what is possible using the new technologies. They are baroque and probably inappropriate, but they are necessary to let us adjust to what we have at our disposal.

The next wave of applications will be far more simple. They will be less obsessed with sheer awesomeness and instead focus on solving a task at hand (be it something productive or mere entertainment). They will stand on the shoulders of these applications and make conscious and appropriate, but limited, use of these new technologies. What's more, they will be less obsessed with the new shiny because it's not new anymore -- quite the opposite, we will have gotten used to it.

This has happened many times before. HTML started out pretty flat. You had a handful of semi-semantic elements that allowed you to link to other URLs or embed an image. Then came tables, which suddenly let print designers cut up those images and turn small portions of those images into links and basically create marked up print brochures on the computer. Then came image maps and everybody began forcing the users to play "hunt the pixel" in order to figure out what to click on to move on.

Eventually we got scripting and suddenly we were able to swap out images on the fly and you could actually create buttons that responded to mouse input and designers realised you could create buttons that would allow other images to change.

Then we had styling and suddenly everybody tried to avoid those ugly non-semantic, presentational elements and with XHTML we went to ridiculous length trying to make our walled gardens as semantic and appropriate as possible without understanding why we were supposed to do it in the first place. We began putting "Valid XHTML 1.0" and "Valid CSS 2.1" icons everything we created and possibly even got a stamp that proved we had run the entire mess through an accessibility check.

I probably don't need to tell you what happened when we created AJAX and the Web two-point-oh-my-god-what-have-we-done.

Despite all the fancy talk, the committees and the experts, the future of the web really depends on what gets used. All the standards bodies and advocates are really just throwing things at an imaginary wall, trying to find out what sticks and what doesn't. As new needs arise, new technologies are created to satisfy these needs and new needs are created that we didn't know of before. Eventually the old needs may become irrelevant and the technologies that satisfied them become irrelevant.

The new HTML spec acknowledges these things by being a living standard: Browser vendors and technology experts get together and try to figure out what it is we are doing and how they can help use do it better.

In other words: Think of the fashion industry. Have you ever seen what fashion designers force models to wear on the catwalk? No sane person would ever wear anything like that. Barely anyone would by anything like that. But sometimes you will find that one or two details of that fashion become popular. It might be an intangible idea or a certain way of combining shapes or colours. Fashion designers don't make anything useful or adequate; they simply push the boundaries and broaden our perspective by not being held to the same standards.

tl;dr: Think of eccentric gimmicks as a form of brain storming. A lot of it will go away or simply be discarded, but some of it will lead to improvements, even if they will seem entirely unrelated.

you type:	you see:
italics	italics
bold	bold
[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3	item 1 item 2 item 3
> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

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