Dear HTML,
I love you, but you’re bringing me down.

Yours Truly,
-Tom

I don’t want to read NYTimes.com on my Macbook Pro anymore. I would much rather read the NYTimes Editor’s Choice iPad app. The same goes for the WSJ. iPad apps are generally so far superior to their HTML counterparts it’s hard not to notice. iPad versions of newspapers look like the awesome mockups we were promised thirty years ago, while today’s web versions of newspapers still look a lot like what was actually available thirty years ago (see this awesome KRON news clip from 1981).

Is the solution to bring apps to the desktop? I don’t think so. I propose that the solution is to evolve the tools we use to create the web closer to the tools we use to create apps.

The web’s infrastructure needs to remain as open as possible. Yes, HTML5 will help, but no, it won’t go far enough in making the web as easy to make beautiful (for instance, providing the library of the sorts of standard interface elements that iPhone OS SDK does). I want HTML to make it as easy as the iPhone OS SDK to layout content with incredible production value without resorting to Flash (or any other closed or 3rd party plugin) or forcing every web designer to reinvent the wheel.

HTML can learn a lot from the iPad and the iPhone OS SDK. Will it? I don’t know, but if the web/HTML is to remain competitive and as open as it has historically has been, I think it needs to incorporate some of the lessons from folks like Apple in a way consistent with its core beliefs. If it can, the web might even become more open. Otherwise, consumers will seek to consume content where it is most appealing and producers/publishers will go there as well (and probably earn superior CPMs given the better production value and branding opportunities) and that may not be on the web, but in an app and I think that would be ashamed.