The Internet has firmly entered all spheres of life. We spend most of our time on social networks, chatting, watching videos, working and doing business.

I started using the Internet in 1994, when I was studying at the Novosibirsk State Technical University. One of the first sites I visited was the Deutsche Welle website, since the website address was listed in their TV programs. I remember my impression when I received a response from a computer from Germany. It was comparable to teleportation. It was hard to believe that information could be transmitted so quickly over long distances.

I was using a very modest 386 computer by today's standards running Windows 3.11 with Netscape Navigator (the predecessor to modern Firefox), but everything worked very quickly and without lag. In 1995, it became possible to use a computer with a 486 processor and the new Windows 95 system. I used Yahoo e-mail and search engine, and studied the source texts of website pages.

I can say that the basic functions of the Internet have not changed much since then, except for the emergence of social networks, the new global search engine Google and other services that form the basis of Web 2.0.

The Web 2.0 Internet system added the ability for users to like, write comments and upload their own content to sites. At the same time, a huge amount of information appeared in which it became increasingly difficult to find something useful.

The next Internet system will be Web 3, based on cryptography and blockchain. This is a distributed, independent and promising system, but also quite complex, and many major players have doubts about its implementation. In addition, research is actively being conducted on quantum computers in order to find the keys to known cryptographic encryption algorithms, which in turn can cause the collapse of systems based on cryptography. Such systems now exist because on conventional computers, calculating decryption keys can take millions of years.

I will try to imagine what the next generation Internet, Web 4, might look like and describe its basic principles.

Before the advent of computers and the Internet, the main attention of society was occupied by television and, even earlier, by cinema. This is a total period of about a hundred years. Before that, there were books and various texts.

However, today the basis of the Internet is texts, as it was a hundred years ago. We spend time online and constantly read something. Gradually, an increasing share is occupied by various video services. Television is gradually moving to the Internet. User devices often consist of a screen, like in a television or a movie theater. Devices such as tablets and especially smartphones have a smaller screen on which the text appears very small. For VR virtual reality devices, the use of text is not applicable.

I think that Web 4 will have a landscape or cinematic screen format. Of course, the screen can be rotated to portrait mode for appropriate content. In any case, the page is the size of the screen. Therefore, there will be no usual scrolling up and down. Instead, there will be movement in three-dimensional space, like in a video game.

The text will remain in the form of a normal book. On the screen, it will be located in the pages of the book, as it was presented in the publishing house.

The pages of the website will look like glossy magazines made by professional designers. No layout steps are required. The designer will be able to publish his work on the site individually. The format of the main page will be XML. Next, I will describe this format in more detail.

Improving the appearance of websites provides huge business benefits. Companies will be able to present their products in an atmospheric environment, which will help customers make the necessary and right choice for them. Customers will be able to immerse themselves in the ecosystem of the online store and better explore new products. Corporate analogues of social networks will appear, which will reduce the costs of creating your own websites. Artificial intelligence will help in processing and generating content.

New players will appear on the familiar Internet. Thanks to the unification of the page format, they can be read by different devices connected to the Internet. We will begin to notice the presence of the Internet of Things. Smart coffee makers and refrigerators will begin to receive likes and comments. Cars will buy the necessary car parts themselves in car stores and pay at gas stations.

Social networks will turn into virtual worlds. Regular text comments will be replaced by video comments. All you have to do is give your opinion in front of the screen, and the comment will be added. Videos and computer games are integrated into the virtual space of a website.

It should be noted that this integration process is not yet complete. The main format of the Internet remains text. At first, access to various scientific works and reports was required, mainly in the form of texts. In the first browsers or programs for viewing HTML documents, the text occupied the entire width of the page, with a line break on the next line.

Then, images were added to the text of the page. In the image attributes, you can specify how the text should be positioned around the image.

The HTML format is called hypertext and is used to mark up elements on a page. The main idea of this format is hyperlinks that allow navigation to other related HTML documents. These documents are organized according to the XML markup language to define data. It is convenient to present any data in XML format. This language has been understood by all browsers since the first versions.

The difference between HTML and XML is that HTML contains data and defines how to display it on the page, while XML contains only data. While HTML is suitable only for describing the pages of a website, XML allows you to create a data model for anything.

Web 2.0 does not use XML directly, but rather by proxy, a function that has XML in its name, but is actually often used to send data in HTML and JSON formats, the latter being a hierarchical data container suitable for processing in JavaScript.

In addition to the standard display of tags in HTML, CSS style sheets are used to determine the fonts and colors of the page, as well as the layout of elements. This analogue of XML is a set of XSL languages for displaying and converting data in various formats, including HTML.

In this way, the data contained in HTML documents is always bound to the display, even when CSS style sheet files appear. This approach can be called unsystematic, since it led to the invention of many bicycles. JavaScript, which was initially assigned the role of creating dynamic HTML, begins to participate in the formation of a static data display structure.

Currently, displaying a simple page in a browser with a table of 10 lines and a search form with several fields requires hundreds of millions of bytes of computer RAM. This is the same as a sandwich that costs hundreds of millions of times more.

Most Web 2.0 sites contain text and images, but all this is terribly slow, loads multi-core processors, increases power consumption and quickly drains batteries.

For some reason, they decided that they needed to make database queries over the long haul and in small chunks, so the skeleton of the page is loaded first, and then thousands of slow server queries are made to get the missing data. It's like a big ship sailing away and the passengers are getting there by boat. That's why pages load slowly, especially over the air.

XML format allows you to load all the data at once and then style it for display. In the case of the Internet of Things, additional styling may not be necessary; the main XML file containing the data is enough. This is the main difference between Web 4 and Web 2.0: data availability. After all, it is now almost impossible to extract the necessary data from a page; it requires complex parsing.

The Web 4 server must be able to respond with different types of data: text, XML, HTML. Data in XML format can be directly obtained from the database and converted to the desired format.

Page design can also be presented in XML format. This representation must be unambiguous. This is important for creating graphical page editors so as not to spoil the text.

Web 4 will support the principle of zero coding, when a person does not need to work with the text in the program. A convenient interface will be created for visually creating pages, including using neural networks. Graphic elements on the pages can have any shape, and not just rectangular, as is the case now.

The text will remain in the traditional book layout. There are suitable formats for this: PDF and DJVU. There should be a minimum of text on the pages, for example, only for headings.

You can watch a video or play a computer game without leaving the virtual space. Switching between different content will be seamless.

Internet Web 4 will require the creation of a fundamentally new browser and server. This will require the use of new programming technologies. I will tell you about it next time. Thank you for your attention!