In the last 20 years, the diversity of content accessed and devices accessing information on the Internet has exploded. A simple mark-up language, originally designed to link and format basic text documents, has grown steadily over the years to include images, audio, and video. Concurrently, the number of languages developers must learn has grown: HTML, CSS, JavaScript---not to mention the back-end services which drive the site.

The only way your sites, applications, and skill-sets will survive in this complicated, new landscape is to greatly simplify how we implement our designs while simultaneously making improvements to the way in which we mark-up our pages. Doing so has immediate benefits, now, and lasting benefits, well into the future.

By cutting the JavaScript and building upon the open tools given to us by the W3C, we can build faster, more resilient web applications. We can make our content highly available to users and not discriminate against browsers, spiders, or people with disabilities. By remaining true to the open, semantic nature of the web, we can ensure that our content always displays and always has value. The passing fads of today’s web designs should not rot the content that we publish. Content on the Internet is permanent, and your technical implementation should embrace this permanence.

With languages like XML, XSL, and RDF(a), you can create pages that have meaning both to User Agents (today’s browsers) and to the Intelligent Agents of the future. Additionally, your pages are easier to crawl by today’s bots, like Google. With this semantic mark-up, pages are given preferential presentation on search result pages.

Now, devices like Google Glass and Smart Watches have made it increasingly clear that tomorrow’s computing devices will be experiences “beyond the screen”. Or, like in Star Trek, computing will be an intelligent and pervasive part of our environment. Today’s User Agents weren’t designed to survive in these new, screen-less contexts. Instead, the best way to navigate a post-visual web is to have an Intelligent Agent which is able to “understand” the context, information, and concepts presented on the page and represent that data to its user in a condensed and more focused manner.

On the Semantic Web, Intelligent Agents can seek out specific pieces of data because the HTML content is giving added meaning to the computer, using semantic mark-up. With technologies like RDF(a), you can even express relationships between discrete ideas or pages. Sophisticated Intelligent Agents may reason about data on your site in ways the developer never expected. They’ll be able to automatically connect disparate applications. What's more, they’ll do this all without requiring added work for service providers who use semantics.

Even today’s simplistic Intelligent Agents (like Siri or Google Now) are able to answer basic questions, like: “What time does Steve Nash Sports Club close?” or “What is the The Interview rated?” They’re able to do this because the pages which contain that content have semantic markup expressing those ideas in ways that computers can understand. Tomorrow’s Intelligent Agents can take this a step further, integrating numerous services and applications to satisfy more complicated requests, like: “What is the best price on a keyboard in any nearby stores that are currently open?” or “Book my family tickets to a PG-rated movie with the best reviews, showing any time tonight, when we're all free.”

How will your web application cope with this inevitable future of ambient, persistent computing and consumers demanding highly available information in formats that their Intelligent Agents understand? Does your business model accommodate the needs of Intelligent Agents who are able to quickly sift through the noise of a design stripped of its visual assets? And, is the remaining content marked up in a way that’s understandable in this new screen-free context? Is your web application so dependent on technologies like JavaScript that it has mutated into something other than a part of the open web?

Last but not least, let’s check our privilege as web developers. Let’s not forget that we are lucky to live in highly-industrialized nations with reliable, un-metered internet connections. Let’s not take for granted our ability to see and hear. Let’s do more than dump ice-water on our heads to help those with diseases that hamper their ability to use today’s inaccessible Internet. Let’s consider the needs of every user, human and non-human, and adhere to open standards which ensure those needs are met. Let’s not reinvent the HTML5 wheel by crafting a JavaScript square.

Instead, let’s embrace a timeless simplicity in our designs, build upon open standards, and not think we’re above simple GETs and POSTs---anchors and forms. Let us learn to be constant gardeners of this glorious new future, learning new technologies with the understanding that today’s broken, buggy, and incompatible web is not the thing. It’s the thing that gets us to the thing.

Nolte Burke (website) is an open source developer, consultant, and advocate for the open, semantic web. He has presented at LinuxFest Northwest in previous years to discuss both XSL and open source licensing. Presently, he works as a Product Manager for a large, multi-national eCommerce company. Independently, he develops semantic web applications using an internally-developed open source framework, called XOMBO (website).