The Mainstream Web
The World Wide Web is now mainstream. We can refer to it with a lower-case "w"--"the web."
Today, we rely on the web to carry some of the most basic functions of society and personal existence. We use websites to apply for loans, to sign important documents, to study and learn, to manage our personal media collections, and to access nearly every function of our government from taxes to immigration.
Web access is taken for granted in the United States, and across the world access has been growing at rapid rates. The web has played a pivotal role in facilitating communication in revolutions, crises, and huge entertainment spectacles.
Ubiquitous Technology
In addition to websites playing a larger and larger role in our lives, web technology has become a paradigm in its own right that is spreading its reach into areas far beyond the web as we have known it.
Web technology, specifically the approach of web browsers, was the basis for the mobile operating system, WebOS, which used HTML, CSS and Javascript as native platform features. The goal was to leverage the many developers who know web technology to gain a foothold in growing an application marketplace.
Javascript in particular has become very popular outside of traditional web browser usage. Node.js is a server, written in Javascript, which runs Javascript modules (known as "packages"). This has become a very popular platform and has been made available for many types of hardware. Javascript is powering hardware devices such as remote-controlled quadcopters.
The web tech stack makes its way into mobile applications via projects such as Phonegap and Appcelerator, which package web apps in native application wrappers so they can leverage all the features of an iPhone or Android device. These applications tend to be highly dependent on network-based information and can be almost indistinguishable from apps written using native platform tools.
Web technologies are also showing up in many interfaces as overlays to existing technologies. For example, the menu and UI interface in a videogame, or the guide interface on a cable tuner, may be created via HTML, CSS and Javascript. These technologies tend to be friendly to packaging and delivering on top of a larger experience.