I read an interesting article over at TUAW this morning, chronicling a digital magazine’s decision to nix its native iPad app in favor of an HTML5-based web app. First off, I was impressed because the magazine, Blackline, is a satirical magazine. God knows we could use more humor on the dry, banal Apple Newsstand. Second, the article speculates that this could be the beginning of a trend in which publishers begin to recode their native apps in favor of web-based issues.

It makes perfect sense for online magazine developers, and app developers in general, to want to move away from dedicated apps. After all, “porting” a web app for compatibility between devices is a hell of a lot different than actually going in and recoding a native app from scratch for those same platforms. Not to mention the fact that it liberates the content producer from having to navigate the choppy and inconsistent waters of each platform’s app submission process.

Hopefully we will see a migration of more developers away from native apps, as HTML5 standards become more, well, standard across browsers and devices. God knows I’d rather be working in HTML than in C++.