The Mozilla2 platform aims for mobile market. It’s about bloody time. It looks like webkit has already schooled Gecko in the embedded space, so the Mozilla team has some catchup to do.

Eigelb.at … Java doesn’t have to suck. Some examples of funky, embedded Java applets.

I’ve been thinking about the future of the web this week, from the depths of Ajax scripting, WordPress integration, and planning some Palm OS development. The whole fabric of the web continues to shift, unveiling new ways to present content. Things are also happening so that new types of content can be provided (and consumed), as bandwidth increases in availability, and costs to serve it drop. It’s fun to watch it change and dream about what it could be.

Podcasting is one of the first major shifts that’s readily obvious. It’s not quite mainstream yet, but will be shortly as people discover the next generation of radio. Podcasting is to radio, what the web is to print. Not a replacement, but another life for a great medium. The current podcasting tools are primitive, but will improve with the next generation of web tools as it’s a sound concept. It is one of those early hints about things to come: more media, wrapped and served up in new, useful ways.

Embedded browsers are another shift, downsizing (and liberating) the hardware we use to browse the web. This smaller hardware makes the web useful from more locations, and in many new situations. We can now ask questions from anywhere, albeit with a somewhat limited interface. These devices will end up serving the interfaces of our centralized applications anywhere we need them, as well as providing a way to get data to these central data stores (like pictures, text, etc.). When these devices mature, they will serve us audio, video, and text, all wrapped together.

Web applications in general are continuing to improve. Gmail, Google maps, Flikr, for example, are growing into full-fledged applications. Many people don’t care about the differences between Outlook and Hotmail, as Hotmail provides the more-important aspect of access from anywhere. I think that many apps are ripe for web interfaces, and we’re going to see many more rich applications over the years.

Web developers are peeling back the complexity of web development too, embracing things like Php, REST, and Ajax, approaches that remove layers of complexity. While the heavy-weight MVC crowds balk at the digression, these simpler approaches are regularly churning out useful applications ([Yahoo], Google, Flikr are all examples). It’s a balance, of course, between faster development and maintainability, but the current successes seem to side on the agile.

The trick with these trends is to consider how they displace or augment what we have now, and then dream about how it could all be better. We’re seeing the infrastructure of the web opening up, moving toward simpler, more orthogonal approaches. The cost of providing and consuming stuff on the web is falling quickly, so that audio and video are now plausible things to wrap into sites. The number of devices we can access it all with is increasing, so much so that keeping our personal data on all of them is an unlikely problem to solve — meaning that centralized applications are a simpler solution. Considering audio, video, and the richer web constructs available, sites will be combining more of these things together, in many different ways, accessible from anywhere on anything that’s networked. It will be fun.

Images taken with my new test platform, a Palm Treo