By Christian Heilmann CHAPTER 3

Chapter three · by Christian heilmann

The vanilla web DieT

here’s no question about it: a lot of the content on the Web

these days is consumed on mobile devices and tablets. In some

new and emerging markets, mobile devices will be the first thing

people use to go online as the infrastructure for desktop devices isn’t avail-

able and mobile masts are easier to put up than putting fiber optics in the

ground.

We should be ready for that challenge — Web technology is flexible

enough after all — but when you look at the things we put on the Web and

how many companies opt for native apps or mobile-optimized versions in

parallel to their main website, there seems to be a worrying disconnect.

The hype about HTML5 and its perceived victory over Flash is reced-

ing slightly and now is a good time to analyze what we do and change our

approach to be ready for a new bunch of people coming to the Web.

With Moore’s Law^1 in full effect, we all work on very powerful,

high-resolution devices with fast connections when we develop, and a lot

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

T