I've been thinking about this a lot lately: what's the future of the web?

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где она мера? by Kosta T

Through The Storm by P C III

Open Door by Little Glass Men

Line-by-line notes

The web used to be like a weird piece of avant garde music

Nobody understood it, and nobody could work out how to apply it to anything

Until Tim Berners-Lee

In 1980 there was a man called Tim Berners-Lee

Tim still exists today too by the way, he hasn't vanished or anything

But in 1980, he was working on something very special at CERN.

He'd previously made a prototype of his information sharing network, that at the time he called ENQUIRE

He'd been working on the idea of hypertext: interlinking documents and pages and sharing information

When he became a fellow at CERN in 1984, he saw the opportunity to take this idea further

Tim created something called the World Wide Web, by pulling together lots of different technologies like the Internet, and hypertext

The first website went online on 6th August 1991.

It's still online today.

From there, the rest is history.

And today, I want to speculate on the future.

This is AADA, and I'm Craig Burgess

Music

27 years later, the world wide web is more powerful and all encompassing than ever

It's used for everything,

from just plain old boring websites,

to replacing government services,

to allowing you to book holidays online

To actually providing people jobs, like me

I think few people would argue with me when I say that the world wide Web and the Internet are the two most important inventions of the last 30 years,

And a strong argument could be made for the most important invention of all time too

Think for a second

You could probably just about imagine life without some of the other greatest inventions

If they were gone tomorrow, you could get by without a TV

Without a car

Without a microwave

Without maybe even a phone

But try and imagine a life without the internet

And that's nearly impossible

On a daily basis, I communicate with people

Pay bills

Book cinema tickets

Sometimes book holidays

Upload a podcast to let you listen to it

Check my bank balance

Update websites and get paid to do it

Make people websites and get paid to do it

Doing all that without the Internet

Is either really hard or impossible

So that's the Web now, but what is the future?

I think about this a lot

Especially when I think how far the Web has come in 27 years

What will it look like in another 27 years?

That’s a really tough question to answer

Especially when I consider that 12 years ago, I couldn’t have predicted responsive websites

The way that websites now expand and contract based on the size of the screen viewing it

Before that, everybody made two websites

A mobile website

And a desktop website

Even that simple thing

Was precipitated by the rise of the smart phone

And popularised by Apple’s iPhone, and then the ensuing Android phones

I think the future is in mobile

I think in 20 years time, they’ll be no such thing as a desktop computer

We’ll look back on 2017 and the 2020s and think about how weird we were

I think we’ll all use touchscreen devices permanently for every task, or some other kind of input I can’t even imagine right now

The laptop, the PC, that will all be gone, because we won’t need it

It’s more immediate to tap a screen right on the thing you want to change

Than it is to guide an arrow on a screen to that location with a mouse

There’s lots of maturing that needs to happen before then in the touch screen space

Apps need to get more fully featured

And somebody needs to break out of the gaming and entertainment bubble,

and start to explore the idea of making serious productivity apps for touchscreen devices that take advantage of the medium

Rather than being hindered by it

And when the web is entirely mobile

When 90-100% of all people consume websites on...