The future of the Web

The Web really only took off towards the end of 1993 and is still at an early stage in its evolution. The pace of development is extremely rapid. As a number of people have independently implemented Web browsers and servers, often making the source code freely available, others, identifying problems or limitations, have been able to experiment with possible solutions and publish their results; hence a great many suggestions continue to appear in the relevant Internet mailing lists and news groups.

As mentioned earlier, the W3 Organization and Consortium have just been set up and are expected to play a major rôle in the development of the Web. The first tangible output has been the release of Arena, a prototype HTML version 3.0 browser written by Dave Raggett of Hewlett Packard Laboratories, who has been prominent in the discussion of enhanced versions of HTML.

Commercial products are also starting to appear. These include browsers such as commercial versions of Mosaic and Netscape, authoring tools (SoftQuad's HoTMetaL), tools for managing and indexing information, and browsers that can display information in other formats in addition to HTML (Adobe Acrobat, SGML).

The main areas of development at the moment are: improving the performance of servers, enhancing security facilities to allow the transmission of sensitive information such as credit card details, and extending the feature-set of the HTML language. The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) will become increasingly important as HTML is now defined as an SGML document type. One anticipated area of development is that of intelligent agents or knowbots which will scour the Web for answers to questions specified by users. New versions of HTML and HTTP will probably be standardized in 1995.

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[ITCP] Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.