After reading Tantek write about file formats, I've been thinking about what will happen to file formats in decades or centuries from now. Tantek says,

"I feel quite confident storing files in the following formats: ASCII / "plain text" / .txt / (UTF8 only if necessary), mbox, (X)HTML, JPEG, PNG, WAV, MP3, MPEG"

I agree, for the short term. But will JPEG be around in a hundred years? What about MP3?

I think we can make some assumptions about the future. For example, disk space will continue to grow and get cheaper, and bandwidth will get faster and cheaper as well. This leads me to think that compressed lossy formats will disappear. Why store in a JPEG when a PNG or even RAW format will do? Why store in MP3 when a WAV will do?

Okay, I don't think we will necessarily store in the least compressed format. I think we will use a format which uses lossless compression, so that the sound/image doesn't change at all. It won't make sense to lose quality to gain disk space anymore.

What about HTML? Oh, I don't know. This is a big question. The web is very new and it's not clear the direction it's moving in. We are using HTML, CSS and JavaScript in ways it was never intended to create desktop-style applications. I think application markup languages like XUL, XAML or even HTML 5 will take off where HTML leaves off, and we'll have no reason to continue abusing HTML the way we have been.

For hyperlinked documents, I believe (X)HTML will stay around for a very, very long time. CSS can grow and change and add display functionality on top of HTML. Put does HTML need to change? Do we need anything more than headers and paragraphs, with span or div tags together with classes to accomplish anything not built into HTML? I don't believe so.

It will be interesting to watch formats and standards evolve over the coming years and decades. I think one day, people will look back at these times with a smile on their faces, enjoying our naivety in these early years as we try to figure everything out.

Welcome to the first monthly Carnival of the Web. Below you'll find some of the best posts from the past month in the web professional blogosphere.

The next Carnival of the Web will be posted on Sunday, July 23rd. If you write about web design or development and want to contribute something over the next month, feel free to submit your blog posts.

The infamous Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street reminds us to Use Ajax scripting responsibly. Be sure to check out the comments to discover just how intense (and long) comments can get.

Mike Papageorge of the ever popular Fiftyfoureleven suggests some very clever and not-so-obvious ways to optimize the load time of a web site in Reducing HTTP Requests.

Andy Hume at Bite Size Standards knows that Understanding "Any order columns" is difficult. In this wonderful tutorial, he explains why the order of columns in HTML can be different from their order on the screen using CSS.

Emil Stenström, web developer extraordinaire at Friendly Bit helps us remember where we've come from, the mistakes we've made and why it's taken us so long to start using standards again. See why Real hackers don't use CSS.

Dustin Diaz takes a different side in the ongoing debate and answers the question Why inline styles with strict doctypes?

Joe Kissell of Interesting Thing of the Day explains just what is so interesting about Cascading Style Sheets in the first place, with Cascading Style Sheets / Bringing sanity back to Web design.

At RotorBlog, Maris does a side-by-side user interface comparison of two similar personal web portals in Netvibes vs. Pageflakes - design and basic functions.

Artem points us over to Solution Watch to check out a review of something that should keep you distracted from work Up for Ajax Battleship? Play Sink My Ship.

Ohad of Ohad's Internet News offers a new way of writing blog posts that is an ongoing process reacting to user feedback in Evolutionary posts.

Craig at gridbuzz goes below the headlines on the Net Neutrality issue to explain What Net Neutrality is really all about.

Jon Swift takes a look at his recent Google Searches and realises that if the government is watching him, they're going to be in for a surprise.

And last but not least, Chris Quimby shares a humorous tale of helping his mother onto the information superhighway with Throwing Mom on the Highway.

Dan Webb at The Web's Bollocks has posted a great article, Cleaner Callbacks With Partial Application. It describes ways to use JavaScript closures to keep your code cleaner and more reusable, especially when creating XMLHTTPRequest callbacks. If you understand the basics of closures but want to see some practical applications, go check it out.

If you're new to closures or have been struggling to understand how they work, I recommend reading Mark Wubben's introduction, Getting Funky With Scopes and Closures. For a more detailed and thorough analysis, be sure to read Richard Cornford's JavaScript Closures.

In November, I put some tools written in JavaScript on here. These are mostly conversion tools, things like pounds to kilograms, kilometers to miles, etc.

I had the idea of coding and hosting some random JavaScript things on here, but since then I haven't added anything.

Then I forgot about them.

Now, I get most of my traffic on these conversion tools. As of recently, if you search millimeters to inches on Yahoo!, my site is #1. Because of this, I've gotten a whack of traffic just on this one page.

I wonder what it is about that page that Yahoo! considers so special. There aren't even any sites that link to it. It's really some kind of SEO marvel.

This is a last call for submissions to the first monthly Carnival of the Web. Saturday, June 17th is the deadline, as the carnival will be posted here on Sunday.

So if you have a blog that web professionals would be interested in, or if you've read something really great on another blog in the past month, please make a submission.