The internet is a complex ecosystem, and we need to understand how the design and building of our internet-enabled devices works. 

A team of researchers at the University of Virginia’s College of Computing and Information Science (CCIS) is doing just that with a new paper called Internet Design and Development, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The paper describes how the team built a prototype web application that uses a custom web-based user interface. 

Its creators say their approach could eventually help developers understand how to make their own web apps that integrate with other software or services on the internet.

“We want to help developers make better decisions when designing and building web applications, and this paper is just one way to help,” says Paul Mascaro, a professor in CCIS’ Computer Science Department and lead author of the paper. 

“I think there are lots of opportunities for improving the way people work with the web, whether it’s designing for a specific use case, or designing for the web as a whole.”

In the next few years, the internet will become more of a tool than a tool.

We want to have a lot of flexibility in designing web applications for a variety of use cases, and there is a lot more potential for web apps to be developed on the web.” 

To get a sense of how well the team used their prototyping tools, we spoke to Mascarello and his team to learn about their work and get a taste of what the future holds for web design and digital fabrication. 

Puerto Rico is one of several U.S. states that have announced they will require web-related certification by 2018. 

In 2016, Puerto Rico’s Department of Information Technology and Communications, or DICT, issued its first Internet-Related Engineering Standard (ISECS)  that lays out rules for developing a certification for the internet-connected devices we use everyday. 

That new standard was followed by a number of other countries and territories, including the U.K., Canada, Singapore, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea. 

Mascarelli says he is confident that the Puerto Rico standard will become a standard by the time its issued. 

For the past five years, Mascariao has been working to build a software framework to help designers design and build web applications that can integrate with web services. 

When he first got interested in the idea of building his own web application, he says he started thinking about how a browser could handle the web.”

I started thinking, how do we actually make this work?

And I thought, well, it’s probably not going to be easy. 

I thought maybe we need a way to do it from the browser, but then, you know, the browser is already so good that it can do a lot.” 

So he started developing an app called The New Web App, which uses HTML5 and JavaScript to create a web application on a Raspberry Pi computer. 

It was a relatively simple project, but the team was quickly overwhelmed by how quickly it got to work.”

One day we were working on it, and then the next day it was already complete.

And we were just like, ‘Wow, this is really fast, we can do this.’

And then, the next thing we knew, the app was ready to go,” Mascara said. 

Now the team is using their latest app to build an internet-aware design for a new prototype website that will be published in the next issue of Computer Design Magazine. 

There are a lot questions to answer, he adds. 

One of the biggest questions is how do you design for an internet that is not just a web page, but an app or a virtual world?”

One of our big challenges with this is that we need some sort of interface that is really accessible to the users of the web app, but not so accessible that they cannot see it,” Mascal says. 

What Mascari is proposing in his new paper is an application called a “network” for the browser. 

This network could include elements like buttons, text fields, and other navigation elements. 

According to the paper, the design of the network should be transparent to the user, so the user can see the network as a cohesive whole. 

With the network, the developers would be able to quickly create a new webpage or create a template for a different website. 

To do that, the team says they would need to use HTML5’s built-in DOM elements, which allow developers to use JavaScript to control the DOM elements and create a dynamic HTML5 web page. 

And, of course, the network could be a single point of failure. 

While this approach sounds pretty straightforward, Mascal cautions that it is far from a perfect solution.”There