Written by Ramón Saquete
May you live in interesting times! This Chinese curse appears frequently in books and articles in different areas of IT, referring to how fast the industry changes, forcing programmers to constantly acquire new knowledge and update applications. Websites, of course, are no exception; on the contrary, it is one of the fastest evolving areas of IT, so much so that it is no longer enough just to keep abreast of what is happening, but to foresee what is going to happen.
Here are my predictions for 2014:
HTML5 will finally be officially recommended
According to the plan published by the W3C for HTML5, if there are no unforeseen events, in the fourth quarter of 2014 the HTML5 specification will be closed, becoming a recommendation. Until then, some parts of the specification, such as the header algorithm, are at risk of disappearing. Once the recommendation is closed, Google could start taking the new tags into account at any time. This would allow Google to better adjust relevancy calculations, based on whether the text is part of the rest of the page content, whether it is a standalone part or part of the overall site structure.Responsive design and adaptive design will continue to grow.
- Users increasingly prefer to browse from a mobile or tablet, already occupying 20% of visits according to StatCounter and the trend is increasing, so in 2014, all websites to be developed should work well on these devices.
AJAX usage to increase thanks to new HTML5 history API
- AJAX started out as a technology with some accessibility and usability problems when it came to sharing URLs or scrolling through history. The new HTML5 API for handling history solves these problems, so you can now use AJAX and significantly improve load times on any website.
In addition, the Javascript libraries that are appearing to “ajaxify” pages, allow to make implementations, that although they are not very optimized, are faster to carry out.
With this change, SEOs will have to be very careful about indexability and learn when this technology is being used correctly.Fewer external plugins
- Installing plugins is a nuisance for the user and poses a risk to security, stability and performance. Therefore, the trend is to use open technologies belonging to the HTML5 specification, and implemented directly in the browser, replacing those based on proprietary technologies, such as Flash, which has already received a hard blow when it was no longer available for mobile devices.
This trend is set to take hold next year, as Google has announced that its Chrome browser will disallow the use of certain plugins, depending on the API they use to access the browser. Some of these plugins are Silverlight, Java (which is already blocked), QuickTime, Unity, Google Earth, etc. Firefox, on the other hand, will disable all of them by default, forcing the user to explicitly give permission for them to be executed, which will undoubtedly lower, even more, the use of any type of plugin.Increased effects and animations
- With CSS transforms and CSS animations, it has become even easier to create interesting effects on websites that respond to user interactions. The new Canvas element allows you to implement animations and effects, which are very interesting to attract customers to conversion goals. The parallax scrolling technique is now becoming fashionable and will increase in use next year. This consists of making background elements scroll at different speeds with respect to the main content when scrolling, thus creating a depth effect.
More use of microdata and less RDFa and microformats
- We have more and more types of microdata to help Google better present search results and understand the information that appears on pages, increasing its Knowledge Graph and improving search results. Microformats are a bad choice because they mix semantics with style. They are only practical so that pages written in HTML4 and XHTML1.0 remain valid and this is no longer considered important, and these languages are going to disappear, as they are already doing, in favor of HTML5. Google is part of the WHATWG, which together with the W3C and others, has written the HTML5 specification. Google prefers microdata and the WHATWG specification says it is part of HTML5, while the W3C prefers RDFa and says nothing about microdata in its version of the specification. Therefore, it is to be expected that microdata will win out over RDFa, since Google rules in search and this is what drives the money. Although I really hope I am wrong with this prediction, since microdata is a closed format, whose vocabularies are dictated by Google, Yahoo, Bing and Yandex, while RDFa is an extensible and open format. The real reason why search engines prefer microdata is that by knowing the vocabularies in advance, they can save a lot of processing time.
With RDFa, anyone can propose new vocabularies, mix them and establish equivalences between them. This property is basic for the Semantic Web to evolve, which it will probably have to do only with RDF.
According to the plan published by the W3C for HTML5, if there are no unforeseen events, in the fourth quarter of 2014 the HTML5 specification will be closed, becoming a recommendation. Until then, some parts of the specification, such as the header algorithm, are at risk of disappearing. Once the recommendation is closed, Google could start taking the new tags into account at any time. This would allow Google to better adjust relevancy calculations, based on whether the text is part of the rest of the page content, whether it is a standalone part or part of the overall site structure.
Users increasingly prefer to browse from a mobile or tablet, already occupying 20% of visits according to StatCounter and the trend is increasing, so in 2014, all websites to be developed should work well on these devices.
AJAX started out as a technology with some 
Installing plugins is a nuisance for the user and poses a risk to security, stability and performance. Therefore, the trend is to use open technologies belonging to the HTML5 specification, and implemented directly in the browser, replacing those based on proprietary technologies, such as Flash, which has already received a hard blow when it was no longer available for mobile devices.
With CSS transforms and CSS animations, it has become even easier to create interesting effects on websites that respond to user interactions. 
We have more and more types of microdata to help Google better present search results and understand the information that appears on pages, increasing its Knowledge Graph and improving search results. Microformats are a bad choice because they mix semantics with style. They are only practical so that pages written in HTML4 and XHTML1.0 remain valid and this is no longer considered important, and these languages are going to disappear, as they are already doing, in favor of HTML5. Google is part of the WHATWG, which together with the W3C and others, has written the HTML5 specification. Google prefers microdata and the WHATWG specification says it is part of HTML5, while the W3C prefers RDFa and says nothing about microdata in its version of the specification. Therefore, it is to be expected that microdata will win out over RDFa, since Google rules in search and this is what drives the money. Although I really hope I am wrong with this prediction, since microdata is a closed format, whose vocabularies are dictated by Google, Yahoo, Bing and Yandex, while RDFa is an extensible and open format. The real reason why search engines prefer microdata is that by knowing the vocabularies in advance, they can save a lot of processing time.And so much for my predictions for 2014. I hope you liked it and happy new year to all of you!
