If Johannes Gutenberg, father of the modern printing press were alive today, he would be a very proud man. Because when he invented the press 500 years ago in Europe, he probably had no idea of the impact it would have on the world. The printing press made it easy to distribute information. And that's what made all the difference.

It helped bring about the renaissance and the industrial revolution in Europe because it was easy to print and distribute information uniformly, easily, and consistently. Similarly, the web has become a key source of information dissemination and sharing today. It will therefore have the same effect on the world as the printing press did to Europe. So going by the same token, you can be pretty sure that the web would also last for at least another 500 years!
This is the thinking of Hakon Wium Lie, CTO Opera Software, who's also considered to be the father of CSS (Cascaded Style Sheets) on the web. In his presentation at Opera's Up North Web conference in Oslo this month, Hakom talked about technologies that are going to take the web to the next level.

Hakom stressed on the importance of browser extensions. They're idle to bring about standardization on the web and should therefore truly become a part of it. He also talked about how HTML 4 and CSS2 changed and defined the way information was presented on the web way back in 1998. In the future, presenting this information would become even easier and more feature with HTML 5 and CSS3. He said that the future web applications will be created using these two standards. HTML 5 will help to develop applications for the web, and not just documents. It adds local storage, so that the web application can store files locally on the machine so that even if you loose connection you don't loose data and can continue working on the application. The new CSS3 standard will let you do a lot more with text and images on the web than what CSS2 allowed.

For instance, earlier, you were limited to using only around 10 fonts, but now, you can link to freely available fonts. Shadow effects on text are now possible without creating them in Photoshop, thereby taking the load off designers. So while earlier, any fancy text that had to be put on the web was put as images, it will now be possible to put it as editable text with CSS3. So it can be selected and put to other uses.