The mobile web was the future

We saw the signs

Using what tools we had available, we made observations. What we saw was mysterious and new, but we were able to make some predictions. And our predictions all pointed at a coming mobile revolution on the Web.

Capable devices proliferated

There were rudimentary feature phones at first with rudimentary, unpleasant browsers. Then we began to see better phones with slightly better (but still primitive) browsers. And then better phones with tolerable browsers. And then even better phones with browsers that were pleasant to work with and use. So that happened.

The statistics of the web changed

We watched as the statistics of the Web changed: who was using the Web, and how, and where, and when. And those changes showed us, with metrics, that our predictions were generally correct— mobile devices were causing changes at the very core of the way people use the Web.

We couldn't predict everything

There were limits to what we could predict accurately. We couldn't predict everything. We could guess at certain things, and make estimates. We could see the general shapes and outlines of things, but the details were sometimes slow to emerge.

The "old" web was not ready

We could see that in certain ways the old Web was not ready for the new Web. That it broke down in certain ways.

We'd made too many assumptions

In part this was because we'd made too many assumptions. We'd forced a certain size and shape onto the web, and that size and shape was no longer assured to us, and was ever-changing.

(Internet of Things, right?)

And so we got to work

And so we got to work, hustling, bustling and inventing ways to make the mobile Web work.

In our brave new world

And what did we find? We found an entirely new landscape, a brave new world.

A wild and new place

We found a wild and new place, where we had to make our own rules. Like settlers in the American West, we arrived on the scene before society and law, establishing our own way to do things.

We made our own rules

To get things to work, we made our own rules, often in isolation. We'd found a new place where there was no established way of doing things.

It was not a serene world

We found complexity

Instead, we found complexity. Complexity followed by more complexity.

Constellations of Complexity

We may have longed for clarity, but we faced a constellation of detail, a galaxy of specifics.

Making things work

We battled the complexity and made things work, but often found complex, ugly or delicate solutions.

Already at the limit of complexity

And already, then, we were facing the limit of the complexity we could really deal with.

Mobile is not the end of the road

And yet I think we knew even then that, despite its immensity, the mobile revolution would not be the end of the road for the web.

There's so much more road ahead. While the changes brought to the web by mobile were and are fundamental...

...The future of the web holds more, even if we can't quite see exactly all the details.

What is clear is that our ability to conquer the complexity cannot scale to meet the future web.

We need to do as little as possible

To build the future web

Reacting to the new mobile world

As developers in this complex world, we were also under real, commercial pressures to make things work. And we cared.

To make things work under the time pressure, we added some magic. Hacks, workarounds, polyfills—again because we cared. Our goal wasn't to increase complexity, but to get things to work.

For example, tablets happened, dividing our world into even more little pieces.

We had so many Different devices and applications, branching and forking, new paths always appearing, things branching off into infinity.

Trying to tame the wild

We reacted to what was around us in sometimes panicky ways, but our frantic energy wasn't always disorganized. We looked for ways to impose order on the wilderness.

We looked for similarity and repetition, commonality and rhythm.

And we extrapolated on the patterns we found. We used patterns and similarities to reduce some of the complexity of making things work in the mobile space.

At the same time, we found that to be successful we had to become experts. We had to immerse ourselves in the intricacies of mobile details entirely.

We became very specialized and experienced.

We found ourselves extremely focused on the mobile-ness of our pursuits, zoomed way in on detail.

And this put us in a position of losing track of the bigger picture.

—Jeremy Keith

And while we were **nestled deeply** in our mobile-specific
details, a **disruption happened**. Suddenly, via Jeremy 
Keith and other thinkers, this idea...that we might
be doing ourselves a disservice to get so specific with
mobile, that there was, in effect, no mobile web.

Whew

Many of us were caught off-guard and had to think. It was an exhausting and confusing thing to work through.

What is the mobile web?

It made us stop and think and ask a lot of basic questions about what we were doing and building. What was the mobile web?

What is the Web, anyway?

We'd been so focused

We had been so focused on specifics, so deep in the details of the mobile-ness of the web we were building.

There were signs

There were signs out there that we might have been too specific with our mobile-ness. That the web was a more general, universal thing.

The promise we saw in Responsive Web Design was a symptom of this, that it was time to integrate mobile into the wider web.

And to get to a cleaner place, we'd have to toss out some of the mistakes we'd made and clean up some of the excess rubbish that had collected.

Welcome back to the World-wide Web

Mobile is a waypoint on the web, not the end of the journey.

But mobile is not an incidental blip, either. It is fundamental in defining the future direction of the web.

And so part of our job of making things as simple as possible involves merging mobile ideas into the web as a whole.

It's too hard

But before I could work my way through some of these things, I was already stumbling. Because building the Web has become too hard.

With ideas like Future Friendly, we were trying to quiet down the chaos a bit, to focus on what the web had in common, not the myriad details we found ourselves increasingly drowning in.

As for me, at the time, I was just gaining confidence. Take the building of the aforementioned Future Friendly web site. A site with three web pages, two images and one stylesheet.

Though it had taken six or seven of us a full day to put it together, we'd pulled something off and were feeling triumphant about it.

But that wasn't it at all. What Scott was commenting on was that the tasks required to get a working web site out the door are smothering.

Everything felt hard and sad

Thing 1

Integration

Because mobile trends are important

I believe that certain Mobile web trends represent the future of the web. In solving mobile-specific problems, we found some seminal solutions that apply to the greater web.

Embracing constraints

Some examples: Mobile-first, constraints-first design allow us to focus on what's really important in the things we're building.

Treating our content gracefully, respecting the fluidity of content as it flows in designs in many kinds of environments.

These ideas are seminal and will be part of the future core of the web.

Thing 2

Details vs. Minutiae

To save ourselves from drowning, we need to learn how to discern between attention to detail and soul-crushing minutiae.

Thing 3

Managing Risk

We do have to worry: Will it work later? Will we be able to maintain it?

Because everything we actively do introduces risk, we need to take caution with what we add. We need to stop and think each time we throw in another device-specific workaround, enhancement or hack.

We want to avoid creating a jungle of complexity that gets overgrown and confused, right?

We want to do this to avoid accidentally, arbitrarily caging our content and making it rigid.

Thing 4

Advocating for Standards

This is about asking those who are driving the inner workings of the Web: standards creators, browser makers... Asking for what we need.

But I know that navigating this world and knowing how to communicate the right things can feel like an enigma.

And not only do we need to join in the conversation and ask for what we need—we also need to understand what we're asking for.

That is, if we're asking for the moon, we should be able to know what to do with the moon when it's given to us.

To make sure we're ready, we have reading and learning to do.

Because these standards are the gears of the web; we need them, and we need to know how to use them.

Thing 5

Letting Go

As developers, we are on the front lines. We feel that it is our burden to get things working, to make everything work and work well.

But we need to make sure our burden is manageable, that we're not taking on more than we should in the long run.

That is, we need to recognize that there are more people and factors involved, that we're not the only ones who can make things go and work.

Even though it can be unclear and confusing to tell whose responsibility everything is—device-specific bugs, supporting weird browsers—we should consider that it might not always be our responsibility.

Five things

(That are hard)

At the same time that there is a list of five things that we can do and think about to make the web a simpler place to be again, there are also things that are hard.

Dealing with the loss of "mobile" in our web

Even the semantic shift may prove a hurdle to us.

Changing our focus and our job titles from "Mobile Web" to "Web" again. It's not exactly losing face, or shameful, but it's a pride thing a bit, maybe.

That word mobile: It's part of our identity. It's part of how we filter and see the world around us.

But I think we'll get past this little disaster: we will get past it and bloom again!

But beyond ourselves and altering our self-image, there is all that mobile-specific stuff we built. And some of it is crazy but genius.

We don't want that inspired knowledge and specialization to rot and ultimately disappear.

And I don't want to lose all the specialness and uniqueness that comes with mobile devices. That stuff is neat, it's compelling, it's why we do this, right?

Instead, we want to nurture the good parts of what we've learned and bring those things to bear on the wider web.

We can't know the whole future

Our vocabulary trips us up

We have to make things work

We risk dumbing down the web

                      Blanketing it with the **average murk** of overgeneralization?

                      Finding the **right mix** of commonality and differentiation is 
                      very challenging.

                      Too much **lowest-common demoninator** and the world 
                      starts looking rather **grey and flat**.

Lest that seem a bit bleak

There is an underlying rhythm to the web, and it can be self-correcting, in a way. It provides the tools for balance and universality, yet the opportunity for uniqueness.

And just as the trend of the Web can swing toward specialization or complexity, I think it can swing back again.

At the risk of using a "too-big-to-fail" argument, the market may help to force the web in a certain direction.