Future of the Web

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Right now, most of the forms that appear on your screen are asking you to rate how cool you thought their server is. Eventually, Web interfaces will (hopefully) appear for everything from the library card catalog to Domino's Pizza.

Authentication and services for pay...

Right now, there's little infrastructure for you to prove who you are to a server so you could make purchases, perform bank transactions, or access commercial databases. Mosaic and the HTTP servers are building support for PGP and PEM to supply authentication and privacy - you don't want anybody with a net snooper to find out your credit card numbers.

Fancier document language

HTML+ will allow cool things like tables! Wow. It's entirely possible to see something like Adobe Acrobat or similar ``portable'' document languages take over if one of those vendors gives the code away, or makes it really, really cheap. Of course, we may be stuck with HTML for a long time to come.

Proxy servers

As popular servers (like MTV.COM) become more swamped, you won't want to connect directly to them. Rather, you'd like something more like Usenet, where documents are cached locally. XMosaic 2.2 supports proxy servers and somebody's already written one. Eventually, proxy servers will hopefully exchange popular documents with each other, and lag times can stay reasonable.