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Reports of the Web’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Jeff Croft, Chief Designerd at nGen Works had an excellent insight on the “death” of the web. The shift of the web from browser-based interactions to APIs and machine-to-machine data exchanges is one that had been on my mind a lot lately, and Jeff summarizes this important evolution succinctly below:

The most important thing I learned about web design and development in 2011 is that more and more, the “web” is APIs and services, rather than sites, apps, and pages rendered in web browsers. Take Instagram: it’s one of the most popular services on the “web” and the entire experience is controlled not by some HTML pages, but rather by an iPhone app. Twitter and Facebook are just as popular—if not more so—via native apps for various platforms (iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, etc.) than they are on the browser-based web. As “web designers,” we have to start realizing that our job is no longer solely to produce sites, apps, and pages built in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We have to expand our definition of what the “web” is. More and more, the “web” is not a platform. It’s a service with clients on many platforms. Wired Magazine called it the “death” of the web. I call it an evolution.