The Future Was HTML5

HTML5 was the future. Everyone said so—the blogs, the conferences, the whole mythology around what was coming next. Flash was dying. Standards were enlightened. If you weren’t moving toward it, you were falling behind, and falling behind was the same as becoming irrelevant. I believed it because the alternative was admitting I was anxious about disappearing.

So I rebuilt the website. Weeks of work pulling apart code and restructuring it against the new spec. Testing on half-baked browsers. Optimizing for a future that barely existed. The kind of work that feels urgent because you’re thinking about what’s coming, about being ready, about not being left behind by the next wave.

When it was done, nothing had changed. The site looked the same. Nobody could tell I’d done anything. But I knew. And somehow that knowing—understanding something before it became obvious—felt like a kind of power. Like I’d made a move in a game that most people didn’t even realize they were playing.

The stupid part is how satisfied I felt with that. Like understanding the mythology made me different. Like being technically correct about tomorrow somehow meant I owned tomorrow.

Of course, that’s exactly how the mythology works. We create this story together—that the future is a tangible thing, that being ahead of it matters, that adopting new standards early is wisdom instead of just pattern-matching against everyone else’s anxiety. And once enough of us believe it, it becomes true. Not because we were right about what’s coming, but because we shaped what we did next based on it.

Maybe that’s all the future is anyway. A collectively agreed-upon reason for the changes we were already determined to make. The specifics don’t matter—what matters is feeling like we’re moving toward something, like we understand it before it’s obvious, like we’re the kind of person who gets it.

I still can’t tell if I was ahead or if I was just good at convincing myself I was ahead. But the code works, so it doesn’t matter.