Pondering Over The Future Of The World Wide Web

20 years ago, a seminal document published by Sir Tim Berners-Lee laid the ground foundation for what has arguably been one of the most important modern inventions, the World Wide Web.

As the world celebrated this milestone yesterday, we take a look at what the future holds for the World Wide Web (not the internet, that's for another day) as new challenges and applications emerge that were never even dreamt of a decade ago.

Speaking in Geneva about the creation of the WWW, Berners-Lee said that the future of the web, as we know it, will lie in mobile phones. Not the current ones but the new breed of smartphones that is currently taking the world by storm. 

A recent report by Informa Telecoms and Media concluded that nearly 40 percent of mobile phones sold in 2013 will be smartphones, growing by a third each year on average. Unlike the current crop of mobile phones, smartphones will be built from ground up to access the internet.

And as Tim Berners-lee rightly points out, smartphones are the only way that the overwhelming majority of the world will actually see the internet at all. The trend towards cheaper smartphones was highlighted at CeBIT and the Mobile World Congress with models starting from around £44.

The WWW was and still is a solution to a simple problem; disseminating information to a larger audience. The Web allowed for information to be shared very quickly and as the internet itself became popular first with scientists. There are more than 100 billion web pages today, a number that is still growing.