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• The application interface supports interaction
from multiple client devices such as mobile
phones and PDAs.
• The application provides a lightweight, yet dy-
namic, user interface.
A definition of Web 2.0 is useless without a for-
mal definition of Web 1.0. Accordingly, Web 1.0 was
retrospectively specified as providing the same basic
Web Application characteristics, but that the applica-
tions and their data were largely static and not user
driven. The client to server interface was also stricter
in Web 1.0 (O’Reilly, 2005).
The more recent web application classification
has been termed Web 3.0, or the ’semantic web’
(Wainewright, 2005). This model places greater fo-
cus on the following:
• Server to server communication technologies
such as Web Services.
• Applications that provide information as a ser-
vice. For example, an application that provides
currency exchange information via an API.
• Applications that aggregate information from
multiple sources and present it to the user in a
value-added fashion.
• Functionality provided by the web browser using
either local or remote stored components that are
provided and serviced by 3rd parties.
The definitions of Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 have
grown out of attempts by business to classify ad-
vances in technology. These classifications have been
retrofitted to bracket convenient periods of that evo-
lution, and as a result the classification of any indi-
vidual system rarely falls solely into a single group.
This is primarily due to the continuous nature of web
development. The classification method presented in
this paper relies on feature selection and interactions
rather than on consideration of how to best provide
solutions to problems found in any current generation
of web application design.
2.1 Web Browsers
Web browser technology has been pivotal in the evo-
lution of the web, acting as the main interface be-
tween the user and published web applications. As the
web evolves, different expectations are placed on the
web browser to provide the functionality required to
support the various generations of web applications.
Web 2.0 saw a push to highly interactive web in-
terfaces. Web browsers have addressed these require-
ments with advances in Javascript (Flanagan, 2002)
and AJAX (Garrett, 2005). These technologies in-
troduced dynamic content to the user, but to date
have been viewed as sluggish and riddled with cross-
browser compatibility problems (King, 2003) (Yank,
2006). In fact, it is not uncommon that web develop-
ers give up attempting to support all the major web
browser platforms. Instead, developers force their
users to use a specific subset of web browsers for
which they have specifically catered.
Vision past Web 2.0 reveals a much greater fo-
cus placed on client-side processing. For example,
the concept of a ”Serviced client” is introduced by
Wainewright (Wainewright, 2005). Extensions to this,
introducing the concept that a web browser can take a
much greater responsibility in client to web applica-
tion interaction has also been further discussed in re-
cent publications (Henskens, 2007) (Paul et al., 2008).
2.2 Previous Analysis Work
There have been various attempts in documented re-
search to model the World Wide Web; these basically
fall into two categories.
Initial attempts focused on modelling the interac-
tions between network nodes on the Internet and how
they relate to each other using such tools as Power
Laws (Faloutsos et al., 1999). These laws model in-
teractions on the Internet as a whole, as opposed to
just focusing on web-based traffic. Various projects
(Opte Group, 2008) (Dodge and Kitchin, 2000) have
built quite detailed maps of the Internet based on these
ideas.
Analysis has also been performed from the Soft-
ware Engineering perspective, focusing on how to de-
sign and model the internals of a web application.
These proposals tend to be based around extensions
(Conallen, 1999) to UML (OMG Working Group,
2007) and detail how to model the objects that inter-
nally make up a web application, along with limited
support for modelling service-level interactions.
Recent work in this field has seen the creation of
the Web Science Research Initiative. Initial techni-
cal reports (Berners-Lee et al., 2007) suggest that this
group will focus on modelling the world wide web
using concepts deeply founded in the Sciences.
The work presented in this paper focuses on mod-
elling World Wide Web applications themselves by
concentrating on the interactions between the actors
involved in a World Wide Web transaction. By mod-
elling these actions we can determine where the cur-
rent issues in the model lie and design enhancements
to usher in the next generation of web application.
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