The World Wide Web is 25 years old today.
The Web is a big deal (as is the Internet on which it is built), I don’t need to tell you! But I did have a few thoughts, solicited by a friend who asked “where [do] you think the future of the Internet will take us in the next 25 years?”
My answer: 25 years is a long time. I expect some big changes (computers inside us monitoring body functions), while other things stay remarkably unchanged (no flying cars).
Even now people remark on how much more personal or intimate a smartphone is than a PC (that image still makes me laugh). Think about this when the Internet includes not just your house and most physical artifacts worth hooking up, but yourself.
In such a world, open systems built on open standards and open source are even more important, for all of these reasons:
- interoperation among implementations;
- freedom to migrate among different vendors’ systems;
- ability to mix-and-match, hyperlink/transclude, copy-learn-and-hack, and monitor/audit against mistakes, malware, and surveillance.
We have more work to do. Let’s go.
/be
Other voices:
These are valuable comments for open web advocates. Also see @timbray post ft. Mozilla, it was moving for me. https://tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2014/03/11/The-Web-is-25
Join all the Mozillians and Netizens in wishing the WEB “HAPPY 25th B’day” https://mozilla.makes.org/thimble/web-we-want-quilt_