The future of app development a critical response

In the article by Richard Firth, CEO of MIP Holdings, titled “The future of app development”, Mr Firth argued that HTML5 is the future of application and website development.

http://pressoffice.mg.co.za/mip/PressRelease.php?StoryID=234343

He goes on and makes reference to some popular organisations like Internet radio, Sports Illustrated and Pandora Media who used the new graphical rendering capabilities of HTML5 to enhance the user experience. Also, that big Organisations like Apple, Mozilla Foundation, Google and Microsoft,  all support the new HTML5 standard. Mr Firth also highlighted that HTML5 is better than application developments that are platform dependant.

The article then sifted its direction to some concerns about the fashion trend of HTML5 and quoted a report that stated that HTML5 is still 10 years away from being a stable basis for Organisations. It emphasises that HTML5 has to be accepted as a standard for Information Systems industry not to fail itself.

The article concludes by looking at the overall support that HTML5 is getting from the Organisations that adopt it to the organisations that support it, to the programmers that built it.

I agree fully with what Mr Firth said. From the advantages of HTML5 like the graphical capabilities and being platform independent, to the unified support it is getting from the community, HTML5 is a powerful standard. Will it take 10 years to be a stable basis for Organisation adoption? I have to disagree, as can be seen in the graph by Powermapper which shows that in 2013 40% of websites are using the HTML5 standard. That is already a 5% increase since the publication of this article on the 12 October 2012.

Will Information systems ever fail itself? In my academia, scholars can’t even agree with what we call our profession i.e. is it Information Technology or Information Systems (Checkland and Holwell, 1997). I think a standard is lacking throughout the information systems/information technology community. Information systems/Information technology needs more international standards like HTML5 and one international standard Organisation that makes decisions about this standard,  like the Cochrane Collaboration (http://www.cochrane.org) does for medicine.

References

 

Checkland, P., and Holwell, S. (1997). Information, systems and information systems: making sense of the field.

 

Powermapper. HTML Version Statistics. http://try.powermapper.com/Stats/HtmlVersions. Retrieved 29 September 2013.