The world wide web has continuously developed and morphed throughout its 27-year history. How we display and style content has gone through various phases throughout this time, the most recent of which was the emergence of a responsive web — one web that adapts to fit multiple browsers and device sizes. When it comes to a web with an ever growing number of "Internet of Things" (IoT) devices such as Raspberry Pis, smartwatches, personal assistants that work solely via voice, and so much more — the potential of the responsive web is going to be tested.
The IoT means even more varied devices out there in the wild that could potentially try to load content from the web. We need to ensure that the web remains as accessible and usable to those devices if we are to avoid another big segmentation like we had in the early battles between mobile and desktop. The last thing we want is one web designed for the IoT and one for the mobile and desktop web.
What IoT Devices Might Display The Web?
A lot of developers don't quite realise the potentially broad number of devices that are likely to try to display web content to people in the future.
Computing Devices With Small Displays
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A 2.8" Touchscreen for Raspberry Pi from Adafruit[/caption]
Devices such as Raspberry Pis with tiny screens from 2.4" and higher have Wi-Fi, ethernet and even 3G/4G connections, giving them plenty of potential for displaying web content. This content may come in the form of web pages from the world wide web, or it may come in the form of local web pages for embedded device manuals, web-based device control pages and local dashboard style web page displays.
Smartwatches
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appfour's Android Wear Web Browser[/caption]
Smartwatches can have even smaller displays, with a whole range of different color ranges and screen resolutions. While the Apple Watch doesn't have a web browser yet, Android has a Web Browser for Android Wear by Appfour and there's every possibility that over time more smartwatch web browsers may be on the horizon (assuming someone cracks how to design the app in a way that's easy to use!). At the very least, if the web is to be truly responsive and accessible everywhere, we should be ready for this possibility. What happens if in the future someone is reading an email on their smartwatch and they click a web link? A simple web browser client on a powerful smartwatch isn't too farfetched.
Personal Assistants Over Voice
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The Amazon Echo (Image Source: Amazon)[/caption]
One new trend in computing is the smart voice assistant, such as Apple's Siri, Amazon Echo's Alexa, Google Now and Microsoft Cortana. These assistants' role in the home will be to turn lights on and off, set alarms, adjust the thermostat temperature and so on. These services also respond to voice commands and questions with data they retrieve from various places online — usually this involves pairing each company's databases of information with the details it can get about the person using the service itself. For those interested in the area, I've covered how to get started building your own simple artificial intelligence assistants here at SitePoint in the past, including a piece on Five Simple Ways to Build Artificial Intelligence in 2016 and a series on How to Build Your Own AI Assistant Using Api.ai.
Over time, with improvements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, these assistants just might scour the web for information and read it back to us.
To allow this to be possible, the web needs to be accessible to bots who will plan on reading the information out, rather than displaying it visually. Ideally, web pages should already be structured to suit this for screen readers, however adoption of accessible markup is often an after thought today. The emergence of personal assistant AI services just might help change that.
Entirely New Displays
The computer displays of the future, when it comes to the Internet of Things, could include a range of new and pretty fantastic possibilities. Think about devices like smart mirrors, smart windows, smart car dashboards — these will occur just casually throughout our lives, but how nicely will the web display on them? A whole range of new design decisions arise — to display content on a mirror/window, you might need to have more contrast between colors. Mirror/window displays could have a limited color range which web developers will need to account for? It's going to be a whole new (and exciting) world.
[caption id="attachment_134187" align="aligncenter" width="710"] A Mercedes Benz dashboard prototype (Image Credit: Mercedes Benz)[/caption]
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