World Wide Web: whence, whither, what next?

The World Wide Web (WWW) has become, next to electronic mail, the most popular Internet application. It has been a major contributor in turning the Internet into a household word. The WWW allows users to retrieve text and multimedia objects from servers located throughout the world, with objects connected by hypermedia links. The author presents a snapshot of the WWW after about half a decade, and speculates about where this young medium might be improved and which directions it might take from a technical perspective. Like most (successful) Internet technologies, the underlying central functionality of the Web is rather simple: a naming mechanism for files (the universal resource locator, URL), a typed, stateless retrieval protocol (hypertext transfer protocol, HTTP), and a minimal formatting language with hyperlinks (hypertext markup language, HTML).