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The Future of HTML and CSS

Den Odell on the future of HTML and CSS.
Den Odell, Sweeden,  on the future of HTML and CSS.

What is the future perspectives for the HTML and CSS standards? At the Future of the Web conference Den Odell started with a definition for responsive web design, somewhat like this:

… the website appears to have been built for that particular device.

Odell talked about what is going to happen with HTML and CSS soon, in the future and the end goal of RWD.

Soon

The new specifications for HTML5.1 and CSS level 4 is in the near future. A great improvement is the pictures tag. Here a new attribute is srcset that will work in the img and picture tags.

<picture 
    srcset="tiny.jpg 1x, larger.jpg 2x"
    src="myPicture.jpg"
    alt="Here is my picture" />

In the CSS you will be able to use the images according to media queries. And so you can have responsive images in a more elegant way.

But Odell states, that this is in the near future. By now some 52% of the web browsers support using pictures and images like that.

The future

Here Odell presented ideas for media queries, for instance a webpage might look different from country to country or even from continent to continent. The CSS might look somewhat like this:

@media {
    continent: europe;
}

Perhaps the user acitity could be monitored. What if you’re jogging while on the webpage?

@media {
    activity: jog;
}

Connection speed is also an important factor, so perhaps you could address the problem thus:

@media {
    connection-speed: slow;
}
The end goal

For Odell the end goal is this: the browsers must disappear. So in conclusion Odell asumes, that the GUI will:

… apear to have been built for the user.

From the helicopter perspective Odell’s vision is a movement from a focus on devices to focus on the user.