WWW: past, present, and future

The World Wide Web is simply defined as the universe of global network-accessible information. It is an abstract space within which people can interact, and it is chiefly populated by interlinked pages of text, images, and animations, with occasional sounds, videos, and three-dimensional worlds. The Web marks the end of an era of frustrating and debilitating incompatibility between computer systems. It has created an explosion of accessibility, with many potential social and economical impacts. The Web was designed to be a space within which people could work on a project. This was a powerful concept, in that: people who build a hypertext document of their shared understanding can refer to it at all times; people who join a project team can have access to a history of the team's activities, decisions, and so on; the work of people who leave a team can be captured for future reference; and a team's operations, if placed on the Web, can be machine-analyzed in a way that could not be done otherwise. The Web was originally supposed to be a personal information system and a tool for groups of all sizes, from a team of two to the entire world. People have rapidly developed new features for the Web, because of its tremendous commercial potential. This has made the maintenance of globalWeb interoperability a continuous task. This has also created a number of areas into which research must continue