The web is a house that was occupied while still being built. And much of the plumbing and wiring was thrown together to meet immediate needs-with little thought to the long term. But if the Web is going to become comfortably habitable, it will need a refurbishing at its core.

Fortunately for all of us who are now living there, just such a replumbing is in the works. The initiative, by a working group of the MIT-based World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (see "The Web's Unelected Government", TR November/December 1998), goes by a daunting set of initials, HTTP-ng. That mouthful translates into the next generation ("ng") of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). Just like plumbing, HTTP brings and carries away: uploading and retrieving documents, and embedding hyper-links. And while the new protocol won't directly change the look and feel of the Web for most casual surfers, the behind-the-scenes refinements will create standards to better support the proliferation of new online services for the Internet.