Web Development
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What's Next: Latest Trends

Description: Web development is an ever changing landscape. That's why it pays to keep up with the latest developments to see how your website could be affected.

Everyone will have a different answer to the question of what will come next in terms of web development trends for the coming months. One thing that most people agree on though is the continued development of Web 2.0 websites.? Hand in hand with that go the developers who are constantly striving to come up with new ways and means of stretching the Web 2.0 boundaries and creating numerous applications to try and do just that.

With the proliferation of websites such as MySpace and Facebook, and the speed at which people are joining and actively participating in them, there is no reason to suppose that this trend won't continue for a long time to come yet.

The other main thing to watch out for as far as web applications are concerned is how well cascading style sheets (CSS) blend their way into the world of web development. In the future they will almost certainly be the order of the day, but it remains to be seen how long this will take to become a reality.

Quite often the latest trends aren't in the big whizz bang applications that take the world by storm. Instead they can be found in the smaller applications which save us time, cut corners but in a good way, and make everyday and sometimes tiresome aspects of the web developer's life that much easier to cope with.

We can also expect to see more improvements in the existing applications we use to create our websites. Will more people start to use XHTML instead of the old standard HTML? Will JavaScript still be as popular, or are there better scripting languages in the wings waiting to take its place?

It's almost certain that more webmasters will start to realize that a computer isn't the only place someone can access their website from. Cell phones are becoming increasingly web friendly, although we can't yet say that all websites are becoming cell phone friendly.

The important thing to remember is that future trends in web development can come from all directions, so we shouldn't give priority to one over another. The next great AJAX tool could equally come from a major software company as it could from a sixteen year old nerd working out of his bedroom. That's where web development gets so interesting - we never know where the next great piece of software, or the next neat application, will come from.

Perhaps the most important future trend will be that we try and embrace all the new tools and applications that are being designed to make our lives easier, our websites easier to create, the level of interactivity we have with them more pronounced, and much more besides. If we fall into the trap of thinking that we're happy as we are and we don't need to learn anything new, we won't be stretching ourselves or the capability of our websites.

This could leave us lost in the dust of our competitors.