The World Wide Web allows users to create and publish a variety of resources, including multimedia ones. Most of the contemporary best practices for designing web interfaces, however, do not take into account the 3D techniques. In this paper we present a novel approach for designing interactive web applications – 2-Layer Interface Paradigm (2LIP). The background layer of the 2LIP-type user interface is a 3D scene, which a user cannot directly interact with. The foreground layer is HTML content. Only taking an action on this content (e.g. pressing a hyperlink, scrolling a page) can affect the 3D scene. We introduce a reference implementation of 2LIP: Copernicus – The Virtual 3D Encyclopedia, which shows one of the potential paths of the evolution of Wikipedia towards Web 3.0. Based on the evaluation of Copernicus we prove that designing web interfaces according to 2LIP provides users a better browsing experience, without harming the interaction.