Is “Inversion of Control” the future of Web interfaces?

Responsive design isn’t going to be enough when it comes to providing workable user experiences for mobile Web users. New techniques are leading to an “inversion of control” from server side to client side interactions and interfaces will increasingly mimic look and feel of native apps in terms of navigation an touch control.

The founder of the Drupal content management framework, Dries Buytaert has an interesting post on the topic of inversion of control in web applications with some examples of how the Ember.js Javascript framework can be hooked up to Drupal to provide highly interactive website experiences. The example has a preview headline of an article of an article on the homepage seamlessly expand slide over to become the headline on the article page. This is all during a dynamic page load that places the new page to the right of the home page and slides the browser window over to meet it. It’s very cool stuff (and apparently the crowd at DrupalCon New Orleans went wild).

One of the first comments on his articles pointed to Google’s Progressive Web Apps which is another framework.  For mobile sites, Google has also been advocating for the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project which provides a HTML variant and caching service for faster serving of mobile Web pages.  These are technologies that Web developers need to be digging into.