In this post I will address several web development items that might happen in 2017 and I will express my opinions by buying or selling them.

It will be fun to revisit this post a year from now.. I encourage you to add your predictions on topics that interest you in the comments section.

No need to support IE 11

Earlier this year, Microsoft stopped support for old IE browsers. Their main focus is Edge.

Explorer 11 will not be developed any further so if the web development community wants to move forward, this browser has to make way for Edge.

Is it reasonable to expect that by 2017 web projects will not require IE 11 support?

My answer: Sell. Explorer 11 will see 2018.

To make it clear, Edge requires Windows 10 to run. This is the main reason why it is hard for me to believe that Explorer 11 support will not be needed in 2017.

To add on that, usage statistics between Explorer and Edge still show a big gap between the two in favor of Explorer.

I find it hard to believe that Explorer will go away before 2018. If it does, we still need to see if Edge really updates as fast as it needs to keep up with the others.

Flexbox to be widely used

CSS layout is still done by different techniques like floating divs and tables. Flexbox has been around for a while but many avoided using it due to different reasons. You can still find a lot of discussions online whether to use it or not.

Will we see this change in 2017?

My answer: Yes! Buy! Flexbox will probably be used in 2017 projects.

My expectation is that in 2017, when people start a new project, their layout will be flexbox based.

The main reason why people avoided flexbox until now was due to requirements to support old IE versions. Explorer 11 supports flexbox so that is not an issue and as mentioned before, older versions are now irrelevant so there is no reason to avoid it.

My motivation to use flexbox is quite high as it elegantly resolves a lot of complicated problems. Consequently, I bet grid frameworks will be implemented with flexbox from now on. So you will be using flexbox one way or the other.

Recently I noticed Bootstrap 4 will finally add flexbox support to Bootstrap. So this big community will switch to flexbox in the near future. I have no doubt that Bootstrap 5 will will use flexbox by default.

Angular2 and React setup will be easier

The setup for these libraries requires a steep learning curve of tools such as babel, webpack, typescript and more. On top of that, each of these tools introduce new concepts to learn such as loaders, decorators, presets and such. Not to mention the library itself..

Will we see a change in that during 2017?

My answer: Yes! Buy! We will see an easier setup for Angular and/or React in 2017

I will miss angular1 for its simple setup. You could demo angular 1.0.6 without JavaScript code at all..

I think both tools have a good incentive for simplification. This is why Angular invests in its cli, and why React keeps emphasizing how easy it is.. it's not.

I would take a step further and even predict that React's and Angular's stack will slowly merge. We've already seen one step to this direction when Angular cli chose webpack over systemjs. Typescript supports JSX for React since end of 2015, which makes it very attractive to the React community.

Using Typescript with React today means you need less libraries in your project. It also means you know Typescript - which is also a requirement for Angular2, and that you gain all of Typescript's features to your project. Once developers do this simple math, they will transition their project to Typescript.

With that said, I am a bit surprised to see that JSX's github repository shows no activity. Not sure what to make of it and what does this means about JSX's future - in general, but in React specifically..

I will not be surprised if Facebook will announce their new JSX implementation. They had a JSXTransformer before so they might reincarnate it. Plus, Facebook has dropped such libraries out of the blue before - they've done it with React, and recently with yarn..

I can definitely tell you that the last thing I want to see is one of these libraries fading away.. I like the diversity and the competition. I think we all benefit from it.

Web Components for everyone!

A couple of years ago web components were a very hot topic that was a bit forgotten recently - with the exception of polymer.

Will we see more web components in 2017?

My answer: I buy, and I sell. Web components in 2017.

To make a few things clear - Web Components were never gone or forgotten. They are still maturing and they will continue to do so in 2017 and beyond. We will see more of them in 2017 - which is why I buy this.

Angular2 already uses shadow dom.

React and Web Components solve different problems and should work together well.

Frameworks play nicely with Web Components - according to their documentation.

I understand It is very easy to write and use Web Components today.

You still need to use polyfills for Web Components.

I sell this because UI frameworks that offer CSS style and components like Bootstrap and Materialize will not use them in 2017, and until that happens, Web Components will remain an open topic for me.

For now, these projects have global effects on mine. But that is not necessarily the case the other way around. If I write code in Angular2, and style it, it does not necessarily affects bootstrap's components.

Eventually, they will need to change their approach, and I don't see any other option than Web Components. When that happens - that high standard will be set - I will say that Web Components are everywhere. But that won't be in 2017.

Conclusion

2017 will definitely be an interesting year for web developers. While there are enough topics to cover a book, I had to pick just 4 that interest me.

Please share your predictions to 2017 on any topic that interests you in the comments section.