With the end of the year it is always an industry staple to pontificate on what is going to be important in the coming year.

Although I am not a psychic, I have spent time this week getting a read on what will be important around HTML5. Here is my list:

  • Responsive Web Design grows and matures. The concept of Responsive Web Design is no longer a toddler, but it still is not perfect and that is ok. We are just beginning to figure it all out. Jeffrey Zeldman thinks about it in this article in context with the proliferation of devices. Speaking of devices, you will be hearing more about…
  • Mobile First. This concept defines that we should think about mobile over the desktop when designing web apps. By dealing with mobile opportunities, constraints, capabilities and defining what is truly important, we can create much better apps. Check out Luke Wroblewski’s article about Mobile First design.
  • Typography on the web. Time to blow up our thinking around “web safe fonts” since with CSS @font-face and services, we can now create rich typographical sites like Lost World’s Fairs.
  • Preprocessors, Libraries, & Polyfills, Oh My! We will continue to get a new library of some sort announced every day on Twitter. What will be interesting to see is which ones become popular. I’m betting on SASS, LESS and of course the safe bet, jQuery.

Interested in other industry predictions? Check out Web Design Predictions for 2012.

kitteh

What are your web predictions for 2012?