Tim Owens pointed me to this excellent piece by John Gruber. Gruber has been portrayed in the past as a bit too in the Apple camp; but I don’t think anyone denies he’s one of the sharper commentators out there on the direction of the Web. He’s also the inventor of Markdown, the world’s best microformat, so massive cred there as well.

In any case, Gruber gets at a piece of what I’ve been digging at the past few months, but from a different direction. Responding to a piece on the “death of the mobile web”, he says:

I think Dixon has it all wrong. We shouldn’t think of the “web” as only what renders inside a web browser. The web is HTTP, and the open Internet. What exactly are people doing with these mobile apps? Largely, using the same services, which, on the desktop, they use in a web browser. Plus, on mobile, the difference between “apps” and “the web” is easily conflated. When I’m using Tweetbot, for example, much of my time in the app is spent reading web pages rendered in a web browser. Surely that’s true of mobile Facebook users, as well. What should that count as, “app” or “web”?

I publish a website, but tens of thousands of my most loyal readers consume it using RSS apps. What should they count as, “app” or “web”?

I say: who cares? It’s all the web.

I firmly believe this is true. But why does it matter to us in edtech?

• Edtech producers have to get out of browser-centrism. Right now, mobile apps are often dumbed-down version of a more functional web interface. But the mobile revolution isn’t about mobile, it’s about hybrid apps and the push of identity/lifestream management up to the OS. As hybrid apps become the norm on more powerful machines we should expect to start seeing the web version becomeing the fall-back version. This is already the case with desktop Twitter clients, for example — you can do much more with Tweetdeck than you can with the Twitter web client — because once you’re freed from the restrictions of running everything through the same HTML-based, cookie-stated, security-constrained client you can actually produce really functional interfaces and plug into the affordances of the local system. I expect people will still launch many products to the web, but hybrid on the desktop will become a first class citizen.
• It’s not about DIY, it’s about hackable worldware. You do everything yourself to some extent. If you don’t build the engine, you still drive the car. If you don’t drive the car, you still choose the route. DIY is a never-ending rabbit-hole as a goal in itself. The question for me is not DIY, but the old question of educational software vs. worldware. Part of what we are doing is giving students strategies they can use to tackle problems they encounter (think Jon Udell’s “Strategies for Internet citizens“). What this means in practice is that they must learn to use common non-educational software to solve problems. In 1995, that worldware was desktop software. In 2006, that worldware was browser-based apps. In 2014, it’s increasingly hybrid apps. If we are commited to worldware as a vision, we have to engage with the new environment. Are some of these strategies durable across time and technologies? Absolutely. But if we believe that, then surely we can translate our ideals to the new paradigm.
• Open is in danger of being left behind. Open education mastered the textbook just as the battle moved into the realm of interactive web-based practice. I see the same thing potentially happening here, as we build a complete and open replacement to an environment no one uses anymore.

OK, so what can we do? The first thing is to get over the religion of the browser. It’s the king of web apps, absolutely. But it’s no more pure or less pure an approach than anything else.

The second thing we can do is experiment with hackable hybrid processes. One of the fascinating things to me about file based publishing systems is how they can plug into an ecosystem that involves locally run software. I don’t know where experimentation with that will lead, but it seems to me a profitable way to look at hybrid approaches without necessarily writing code for Android or iOS.

Finally, we need to hack apps. Maybe that means chaining stuff up with IFTTT. Maybe it means actually coding them. But if we truly want to “interrogate the technologies” that guide our daily life, you can’t do that and exclude the technologies that people use most frequently in 2014. The bar for some educational technologists in 2008 was coding up templates and stringing together server-side extensions. That’s still important, but we need to be doing equivalent things with hybrid apps. This is the nature of technology — the target moves.