World Wide Web evolution

In the beginning, World Wide Web was introduced as a medium for sharing scientific and research documents, especially, between government organizations and academic institutions. But with the passage of time, it evolved and crossed the limits defined for it. Initially, till 1990, the WWW(World Wide Web) remains within the boundaries of CERN (a research organization), but by 1991, it became available to anyone using internet.

Evolution of web from Web 1.0 (The World Wide Web) to Web 2.0 (The Social Web) and then to Web 3.0 (The Semantic Web) is shown in following figure.

Web 1.0 – The World Wide Web (1990 – 2000)

• Remain limited mostly to static websites.
• Mostly publishing / Brochure-ware. Limited to reading only for majority.
• Proprietary and closed access.
• Corporations mostly, no communities.
• HTTP, HTML

Web 2.0 – The Social Web (2000 – 2010)

• Publishing as well as Participation
• Social Media, Blogging, Wikis
• RSS – Syndicate site contents.
• Rich User Experience
• Tagging
• Keyword Search
• AJAX, JavaScript Frameworks (jQuery, Dojo, YUI, Ext Js etc), XML, JSON

Web 3.0 – The Semantic Web (2010 – onward)

• Mostly Drag n Drop
• Highly mobile oriented
• Widgets
• Micro blogging
• Cloud and Grid Computing
• Open ID
• Semantic Search
• Semantic Techniques like RDF, SWRL, OWL etc.

Lets see how long Web 3.0 will go and what more will come with Web 4.0 (The Intelligent Web).