It's remarkable how much newspapers look like their parents. And grandparents. And great grandparents. With their medium in its second generation, a similar thing is happening now with news Web pages.

Why this is, and what it means for publishing's next iteration, is the thesis of a short, stimulating piece published this week on TheMediaBriefing.

Products of their times

Newspapers and news Web pages look the way they do, Guardian information architect Martin Belam writes, because of the technological envrionments in which they were created.

In the days of physical type, "interchangeable blocks of text with common widths" were a good way to accommodate late-breaking revisions. In the early days of the Web, "chunks of articles of broadly similar length" served a similar function on larger-monitor, consumption-oriented desktop computers.

Well, we're in the early days of mobile and tablets now. And it's getting later by the second. To paraphrase Mel Brooks' "Spaceballs," then will be now soon.

Tiny screens, many models

In "How the shift to mobile is revolutionising online news design," Belam previews what then will look like. Once again, form will follow function. The influential factors this time will be mobile screens' small size and the diversity of device types.

Design implications

There simply isn't room for 15 related story links, a most read panel, and 100 ways to share an article on the screen of a smartphone or small tablet - not to mention advertising. This forces a concentration on what the user is most likely to want to do next after consuming a story. ... It also means thinking about what are the real interactions you are hoping to encourage from the reader - to share the story, to comment on the story, or to dive deeper into a specific topic?

Development implications

In order to serve a wide range of devices, with differing screensizes and aspect ratios, rather than starting from scratch with a unique app and codebase each time, publishers will most likely ultimately have to develop "one-size-adapts-to-all" systems, relying on open standards like HTML5 and CSS3 to deliver content.

For newspapers and other legacy media organizations this is the best possible news. It's a back to basics approach that rewards their core values of editorial efficiency, consistency and quality.