Having summarized the origins of the Web, and its current state, we now look at some possible directions in which developments could take it in the coming years. One can separate these into three long term goals. The first involves the improvement of the infrastructure, to provide a more functional, robust, efficient and available service. The second is to enhance the web as a means of communication and interaction between people. The third is to allow the web, apart from being a space browseable by humans, to contain rich data in a form understandable by machines.
When the web was designed, the fact that anyone could start a server, and it could run happily on the Internet without regard to registration with any central authority or with the number of other HTTP servers which others might be running was seen as a key property, which enabled it to "scale". Today, such scaling is not enough. The numbers of clients is so great that the need is for a server to be able to operate more or less independently of the number of clients.
Another cause for evolution is the fact that business is now relying on the Web to the extent that outages of servers or network are not considered acceptable. One would prefer an adaptive system which would configure itself so as to best use the resources available to the various communities to optimize the quality of service perceived. This is not a simple problem.
It includes the problems of:
These are some of the long term concerns about the infrastructure, the basic architecture of the web. In the shorter term, protocol designers are increasing the efficiency of HTTP communication, particularly for the case of a user whose performance limiting item is a telephone modem.