• Mark Pilgrim laments that the next generation won’t be able to tinker like we did
• Joe Hewitt sees opportunity in the big screen + sandbox approach
• Steven Frank: Old World meet New World (a must read)

I think Mark laments needlessly and Joe and Steven are right – but none of them touch on the role that the Open Web stack will play in this New World of Computing. Sam did. The more capable the Open Web stack becomes, the less we need platform-specific APIs and SDKs. Why code for iPad when you can code for iPad, Android, WebOS, Blackberry, Windows, OSX, Linux and Haiku at the same time?

2009 was the year I became convinced that one day soon the Open Web (HTML, JS, CSS, SVG) will supplant all those other cross-platform UI toolkits (Java, GNOME, Qt, AIR/Flash, Silverlight) as king of the heap. I’m willing to wager that in 5 years the majority (say, over 80%) of apps that need a user interface will be done using Open Web technologies.

There are advantages:

• No need for an SDK
• No need for user installs
• No need to install a runtime, plugin, libraries
• No need for user upgrades
• Multiplatform
• No vendor lock-in

There are (current) hurdles:

• High performance (improving)
• Interoperable vector graphics (coming… let’s see where we are in, say, 7 weeks?)
• 3D graphics (that will sort itself out soon)
• Video, Audio support (HTML5 will take care of that eventually)
• Better input handling (multi-touch events, gestures, whatever)
• File access (Firefox 3.6 is 50% of the way there)
• Easier networking (web sockets anyone?)

Make it happ’n Cap’n!