I like to think from time to time of the future of the web. Being a web developer/designer myself, and working on every-day basis many times I just sit back and try to see where all this is going.
We can all surely appreciate the evolution of the last years, first with an increase in the use of server side scripting like php, and lots of "interactive" sites being born, and probably the era of the forums, with that "mechanic", heavy-graphic designs that where everywhere.
And I am guessing people simply got bored of all that, after all, as perfect as a design might be, it will always grow old, new trends have to appear. So that heavy graphics trend, evolved into a minimalistic, "zen" trend that is what we now call either Web 2.0 or clean design, depending on the style.

I have to say that many trends have appeared, a very important one undoubtedly is the grunge, eroded style, the one this very blog has right now! Textures and colors in opposition to the clean "crisp" and rounded style of 2.0

There is surely one more aspect of this new era, AJAX and implicitly JavaScript. I remember back in the day when JavaScript was that annoying thing that resized the window, opened popus and on the worst sites put things like "snow" or "rain" on the website... Nowadays JavaScript is becoming thankfully a great resource for simplifying user interaction with the server, which is always good, but the question I pose is "What is going to happen after?"

Let's see, in the design field, I think that there are two main ways for evolution, the clean and rounded feel, with lot's of opacity blends, you know, more on today's line.
On the other hand there is the side of high contrast sites, dark styles with beautiful lighting effects, impressive use of background-color -> font-color, sharp palettes for nice designs, textures of course!
Lots of textures everywhere, they create that unique feeling of rough and at the same time greatly designed structures. Although it has the problem that with today's browser's support for PNG transparencies it is quite hard to do good overlays that can adapt to the screen and move without it being too obvious. That is where today we use big solid borders, that also look good when used wisely.

On the programming field I am sure that a more "module" oriented programming will be used, something more "plug&play" for php specially, like PEAR but more widely used.
As of client-side scripting there is not much room for new stuff, after all we only have JavaScript and there is not much more we can do with it... Probably a complete reliance on AJAX for our applications, nice easing animations, and that sort of things, but nothing too revolutionary.
I don't expect Flash to ever come back, it had its glory but the complete wrong use it was given made it completely hated. However Flash is a great and quite powerfull tool when mastered.

But well, that is my point of view of course,
What do you think the future of web development is?