A lot of web designers and developers ponder what direction the web is heading in the next few years.  I always thought that the web was always behind in time when I made my first web site back in 2000.   Which was basically a cool looking image with all these hotspots in them for links.  I think I might of had some javascript actions like show/hide and toggle (yea I was pretty cool). 

 I started getting into a lot the flash stuff, because it looked flashy and cool.  It seemed when flash mx 2004 and flash 8 came out, there was nothing but really crazy looking(mostly non-dynamic) flash sites all over the place.  I appreciated such a free platform where anyone could put whatever they wanted to on the page, but it seems as though AJAX turned out to do a lot of things flash could do.  So why even use flash?  With SEO being very popular, and developers building better techniques in javascript (i.e mootools, scriptaculous, etc), why even use flash when web 2.0 is here.  For me, it didnt seem like web 2.0 didnt get popular till late 2006.   I could be wrong but that is my perspective. 

So my question is where is future heading for web designers and developers.  When are we going to be heading into web 3.0?  Maybe web 3.0 will have a 3D like feel.  I would whole heartily agree that web is going to get much better in functionality, that will be able to match superior designs.  I see a lot of flash CMS sites now, and I dont know how hard is is to incorporate  a backend language into flash, but it seemed like it would be quite difficult a few years ago.  However, being a 3d guy (maya), I honestly like what the new flash cs4 has to offer.  It seems as though a lot of software engineers are starting to understand complex 3D programs and are now incorporating them into web type programs such as the new flash, giving more dimesions to the program itself. Check out a tutorial on the new flash CS4 at Lee Brimelow's website.

Now I probably won't do it again and build another full flash site.  I still dont know where flash and SEO stand, but I get a lot better results with non-flash sites.  Seriously, search google for a general keyword and see how many flash websites pull up.

My Thoughts on the new flash 

Now utilizing flash to be apart of a website, I am all for.  Looking at some of the new features for flash, I can clearly see it has native 3D and uses IK structures! That is awesome and javascript wont come close in animation.  It even has a motion editor and different editing tab layouts similar to 3D programs.  I think flash has definitley stepped it up, and I guarentee javascript is great for some cool tricks.  I think web development is still in an infant stage as far as 3D goes.  I defintely think there will be another important dimension added to the web in the next year(s) to come(maybe real soon).  What do you think?