World Wide Web at 25: the next 25 years

-> World Wide Web at 25: the next 25 years
The Web is currently going through a profound change, and the next 25 years are likely to be very different from the last

Next month marks 25 years since Tim Berners-Lee set out his vision of the World Wide Web -- a system of interlinked documents that can be accessed via the Internet using a web browser. But the Web is currently going through a profound change, and the next 25 years are likely to be very different from the last.


In his invention of the Web, one of Berners-Lee's most important achievements was the development of the uniform resource locator (URL). Viewing a web page normally begins by typing a URL into a web browser. The web browser then initiates a series of communication messages behind the scenes, in order to fetch and display the page.


Most URLs include a top-level domain name such as .com, .info, .net, or .org. These help the web browser to narrow down the set of servers on which the web page is hosted. Until recently there were only 22 of these generic top-level domains (gTLDs). There was also a separate set of top-level domains reserved for particular countries, but many of these have now become general purpose.


Over the next year, more than a thousand new gTLDs will come online. Hundreds of these have already rolled out, from .shabaka (.web in Arabic) to .sexy, .technology and .singles. This has been hailed as one of the biggest changes to the internet since its inception.