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It’s often said that the world is getting smaller. Of course, it’s not physically getting smaller, but rather, that statement alludes to the fact that the distances that used to separate people are more manageable today because of the improvements in communication and travel.

This could not be truer on the Internet where communication is instantaneous. A letter that would have taken days to arrive could be read and replied to within minutes via email. Documents that would otherwise take days to arrive, now only take a few milliseconds.

Of course, working on the Internet is not without its drawbacks. Working together on our newest venture, Design Instruct, was quite revelatory in that regard as my brother and I endeavored to work from different parts of the globe.

This article is part of Design Instruct Week, a weeklong celebration of our newly launched site,Design Instruct. This week on Six Revisions covers topics that deal with running websites and design, written by the founders/editors of Design Instruct and Six Revisions. Be sure to check out the Design Instruct Week Twitter Giveaway, which gives out different prizes every day of Design Instruct Week.

The Case: Design Instruct

If you’ve been keeping up with Six Revisions over the last month, you would have read about our new website called Design Instruct, which is a new web magazine offering tutorials focused on the visual arts such as design, illustration, photography, and art direction. It is a site born out of our passion for the creative arts and we wanted to share that passion with people.

Design Instruct is our first real venture together. It is the first time my brother and I sought to actually build something of our own (unless of course you count all the make-believe forts we built when we were kids).

It was also the first time we actually started working together. And as if getting used to working together wasn’t enough, we had to do it in disparate geographical locations.

There are many challenges associated with working with someone over a long distance. However, we found that there are solutions to those challenges, and so far, we’ve managed to make it work.

I share with you the areas of our workflow that posed some challenges, and the methods by which we overcame them.

Problem #1: Staying in sync

Working with people in the same town is hard enough. My brother and I are working from opposite sides of the globe.

It’s hard to believe, but the current HTML standards used for a vast majority of the Internet (HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1) have now been in place for more than 8 years – surprising, given the amount of progress that’s been made in rich web applications, video streaming, and social media since then. With the start of the HTML 5 working draft by the World Wide Web Consortium and subsequent integration of some features into modern browsers, however, the development community is beginning to buzz about the future of HTML.

Arguably the most noticeable change will be in the markup itself. Rather than rely on div tags for basic site framework, HTML 5 will introduce tags such as header, footer, nav, section and aside, among others. While not a huge advance from an end-product standpoint, these tags will offer much cleaner semantic markup and aid search engine crawlers in correctly indexing a site.

While most online media players rely on a proprietary third-party technology such as Flash or Silverlight, HTML 5 is working to create standardized video and audio tags for this content. While there is no set codec as of yet (the major browsers have been unable to reach consensus), an example is available for HTML 5 capable browsers at www.youtube.com/html5.

Other notable features on the horizon include native drag and drop, self-validating user input and forms, and a much smaller doctype declaration.

Although new elements haven’t been implemented evenly across all modern browsers, some sites are getting a jump start on the new markup: html5gallery.com

Other Resources:
HTML 5 Working Draft
What a site in CSS 3 and HTML 5 will look like

The Apple Tablet looks to be the next stage of this evolution. Rumor has it that not only is the device going to have 3G access, but Apple envisions it is a shared piece of hardware among the family. Instead of having to jump onto the computer to check your email, you can just have your girlfriend or boyfriend pass you the tablet to check out what’s going on.

In ten years, computers will only be a small percentage of how we use our web. We’re going to be accessing it from nearly every device and appliance we own.