For the Internet of the Future

For too long the Internet has been held back by old inferior technologies. We need to use better building blocks to create a better internet in the future. These new technologies already exist but developers aren't using them because they're afraid of failure. My call for change is that we stop being so risk adverse. It's holding the web back. It's time for more brave individuals to take a chance and start using new technologies that will power the internet of the future.


Origin

From where did my call for change originate? I am a computer science major and for work I make and maintain websites. I love my job, but I am constantly annoyed by the fact that we have to use old technologies for development when we know there is better stuff out there. Where I work we even make real efforts to stay on the cutting edge of new web technologies but we still are held back. I can't imagine what its like to work somewhere where no efforts are really made to stay on the cutting edge. The reason why developers don't use the new and better technologies out there is because a lot of these technologies are relatively untested compared to the old stuff. The question is asked, "Why take the risk of using the new stuff when it might not work out?" The conclusion becomes, "Well, we might as well stick with the old stuff." This risk-adverse mentality is healthy to some degree but the actual degree to which it has been harbored is excessive. It has kept us using the same base of technologies that ran the web 20 years ago. And now we're stuck trying to build extremely complicated web applications with some fairly rudimentary tools. So what we need are more brave developers who are willing to break with the status quo and take a risk. I envision there being enough of these kind of developers that the new will become the norm and the classic frustration accompanied with web development will be alleviated to some degree.

Development

My call for change has been influenced greatly from the feedback of others in the class. Initially I misplaced my call for change. I labelled open standards as the culprit for keeping the web behind. This is true to some degree in some ways but I was always a little uncomfortable labeling it as the definitive problem. This is because in a lot of ways those open-standards are what allow the internet to move forward in a organized way and some of the new awesome technologies out there themselves conform to various standards committee proposals. Also the idea of these standards committees proved difficult to explain and I received feedback (and here) that people found it confusing. I needed my call for change to be centered around something less technical. I needed a different and better way to get at the core of the ideas I was seeking to communicate. Since I knew wasn't going to be presenting to an audience where everyone knew the technical details at the root of my message I had to find a way to make my message a little more universal in nature. This eventually led to my current call for change that is very much linked to the idea of a "brave new world" and explorers willing to risk it all in the name of progress. (Initially I didn't really have a strong historical connection in my presentation so this was a good tie in). With the class as a common point of experience between myself and the audience this seemed like a far better route to take.

What will I do?

I am no hypocrite. A buddy and I will be working on a website over the summer and the plan is to only use the latest and greatest stuff available. So if you happen to be using the accursed Internet Explorer to view the website it may very well not work because we're not interested in promoting bad technologies. Our work of course is only one small drop in the puddle. In order for real change to happen many more developers will need to take a chance and use new technologies. But that will happen one person at a time and I plan to be a part of that.

Update

Robert brought up some good points about my presentation. I tried to make it relatively approachable to people unfamiliar with the field but like Robert said probably could have done a better job. The results of my call to change would hopefully be more developers using better technologies to build the web. There would be no inherent difference in what the end-user sees but since its so much easier to create the same thing with the new technologies the doors to innovation might open. Even more complicated products would then not only be possible but practical to build. Its just like the Lego analogy I shared in class. Legos are great but building super complicated things with them can be hard. More web developers using better technologies would make building these super complicated things easier. That translates into less bugs and better programs and probably more of them.