Is there a Web 3.0?

One's on the way. It's a topic for a different FAQ, certainly. But discussion of the Web's 3.0 iteration has centered on back-end issues such as separating presentation technology and the data, developing and using the so-called semantic Web, and artificial intelligence.
The prospect of separating information from the way it's viewed extends well past making sure that one's Web site is view able in both Firefox and Internet Explorer -- or even in both a computer monitor and a phone screen. As designers know too well, playing catch-up to browsers and devices is a recipe for distraction and frustration. One of the challenges of Web 3.0 will be to come to terms with the ever-expanding universe of devices that seek information from the Internet. Rather than building pages or templates and pondering how to make those behave on whatever devices are around then, those wrestling with Web 3.0 will find themselves working through the ultimate decoupling of the logic, data and presentation of online information.The long-awaited semantic Web, which is actually an expansion of our current Web, aims to make tools as smart about understanding specific information on Web pages as they currently are about knowing what to do when a human clicks on a link. That'll be accomplished by developing a system of machine-readable tags that will differentiate between newer data and older data, between price lists and wish lists, and so forth.
With a robust semantic Web, for instance, one might have an application (an "agent") that can understand not only how to search for information on bobbins, but also how to parse the information to see that per-bobbin prices have dropped by 10% in Southeast Asia this week -- 7% in the past 24 hours alone. If you're a person who cares about your bobbins, you'd probably have your agent configured to alert you that there's a situation in progress. A good agent might even be able to connect the dots between the bobbin crisis and an editorial in yesterday's Bangkok Post advocating a bobbin embargo, or the release of a revolutionary Bobbin 2.0 that'll make all current bobbins obsolete.