The rate of web site deployment increased sharply around the world, and fostered development of international standards for protocols and content formatting. Berners-Lee continued to stay involved in guiding web standards, such as the markup languages to compose web pages, and he advocated his vision of a Semantic Web (sometimes known as Web 3.0) based around machine-readability and interoperability standards. World Wide Web Conference[edit]Main article: The Web Conference In May 1994, the first International WWW Conference, organized by Robert Cailliau, was held at CERN; the conference has been held every year since.Robert Cailliau , Jean-François Abramatic, and Tim Berners-Lee at the tenth anniversary of the World Wide Web Consortium . World Wide Web Consortium[edit]Main articles: World Wide Web Consortium and Web standardsSee also: Internet Information Services, Browser extension, and Acid1 The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee after he left the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in September/October 1994 in order to create open standards for the Web.[47] It was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS) with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which had pioneered the Internet. A year later, a second site was founded at INRIA (a French national computer research lab) with support from the European Commission; and in 1996, a third continental site was created in Japan at Keio University. W3C comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web. Berners-Lee made the Web available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The W3C decided that its standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone. Netscape and Microsoft, in the middle of a browser war, ignored the W3C and added elements to HTML ad hoc (e.g., blink and marquee). Finally, in 1995, Netscape and Microsoft came to their senses and agreed to abide by the W3C's standard.[48] The W3C published the standard for HTML 4 in 1997, which included Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), giving designers more control over the appearance of web pages without the need for additional HTML tags. The W3C couldn't enforce compliance so none of the browsers were fully compliant. This frustrated web designers who formed the Web Standards Project (WaSP) in 1998 with the goal of cajoling compliance with standards.[49] A List Apart and CSS Zen Garden were influential websites that promoted good design and adherence to standards.[50] Nevertheless, AOL halted development of Netscape[51] and Microsoft was slow to update IE.[52] Mozilla and Apple both released browsers that aimed to be more standards compliant (Firefox and Safari), but were unable to dislodge IE as the dominant browser. 1997 advertisement in State Magazine by the US State Department Library for sessions introducing the then-unfamiliar Web. Commercialization, dot-com boom and bust, aftermath[edit] As the Web grew in the mid-1990s, web directories and primitive search engines were created to index pages and allow people to find things. Commercial use restrictions on the Internet were lifted in 1995 when NSFNET was shut down. In the US, the online service America Online (AOL) offered their users a connection to the Internet via their own internal browser, using a dial-up Internet connection. In January 1994, Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo, then students at Stanford University. Yahoo! Directory became the first popular web directory. Yahoo! Search, launched the same year, was the first popular search engine on the World Wide Web. Yahoo! became the quintessential example of a first mover on the Web. Online shopping began to emerge with the launch of Amazon's shopping site by Jeff Bezos in 1995 and eBay by Pierre Omidyar the same year. By 1994, Marc Andreessen's Netscape Navigator superseded Mosaic in popularity, holding the position for some time. Bill Gates outlined Microsoft's strategy to dominate the Internet in his Tidal Wave memo in 1995.[53] With the release of Windows 95 and the popular Internet Explorer browser, many publicly companies began to develop a Web presence. At first, people mainly anticipated the possibilities of free publishing and instant worldwide information. By the late 1990s, the directory model had given way to search engines, corresponding with the rise of Google Search, which developed new approaches to relevancy ranking. Directory features, while still commonly available, became after-thoughts to search engines. Netscape had a very successful IPO valuing the company at $2.9 billion despite the lack of profits and triggering the dot-com bubble.[54] Increasing familiarity with the Web led to the growth of direct Web-based commerce (e-commerce) and instantaneous group communications worldwide. Many dot-com companies, displaying products on hypertext webpages, were added into the Web. Over the next 5 years, over a trillion dollars was raised to fund thousands of startups consisting of little more than a website. During the dot-com boom, many companies vied to create a dominant web portal in the belief that such a website would best be able to attract a large audience that in turn would attract online advertising revenue. While most of these portals offered a search engine, they were not interested in encouraging users to find other websites and leave the portal and instead concentrated on "sticky" content.[55] In contrast, Google was a stripped-down search engine that delivered superior results.[56] It was a hit with users who switched from portals to Google. Furthermore, with AdWords, Google had an effective business model.[57][58] AOL bought Netscape in 1998.[59] In spite of their early success, Netscape was unable to fend off Microsoft.[60] Internet Explorer and a variety of other browsers almost completely replaced it. Faster broadband internet connections replaced many dial-up connections from the beginning of the 2000s. With the bursting of the dot-com bubble, many web portals either scaled back operations, floundered,[61] or shut down entirely.[62][63][64] AOL disbanded Netscape in 2003.[65] Web server software[edit]Further information: Comparison of web server software, Comparison of server-side web frameworks, and List of content management systems Web server software was developed to allow computers to act as web servers. The first web servers supported only static files, such as HTML (and images), but now they commonly allow embedding of server side applications. Web framework software enabled building and deploying web applications. Content management systems (CMS) were developed to organize and facilitate collaborative content creation. Many of them were built on top of separate content management frameworks. After Robert McCool joined Netscape, development on the NCSA HTTPd server languished. In 1995, Brian Behlendorf and Cliff Skolnick created a mailing list to coordinate efforts to fix bugs and make improvements to HTTPd.[66] They called their version of HTTPd, Apache. Apache quickly became the dominant server on the Web.[67] After adding support for modules, Apache was able to allow developers to handle web requests with a variety of languages including Perl, PHP and Python. Together with Linux and MySQL, it became known as the LAMP platform. Following the success of Apache, the Apache Software Foundation was founded in 1999 and produced many open source web software projects in the same collaborative spirit. Browser wars[edit]Main articles: Browser wars and History of the web browserSee also: Comparison of web browsers, List of web browsers, and Usage share of web browsers After graduating from UIUC, Andreessen and Jim Clark, former CEO of Silicon Graphics, met and formed Mosaic Communications Corporation in April 1994 to develop the Mosaic Netscape browser commercially. The company later changed its name to Netscape, and the browser was developed further as Netscape Navigator, which soon became the dominant web client. They also released the Netsite Commerce web server which could handle SSL requests, thus enabling e-commerce on the Web.[68] SSL became the standard method to encrypt web traffic. Navigator 1.0 also introduced cookies, but Netscape did not publicize this feature. Netscape followed up with Navigator 2 in 1995 introducing frames, Java applets and JavaScript. In 1998, Netscape made Navigator open source and launched Mozilla.[69] Microsoft licensed Mosaic from Spyglass and released Internet Explorer 1.0 that year and IE2 later the same year. IE2 added features pioneered at Netscape such as cookies, SSL, and JavaScript. The browser wars became a competition for dominance when Explorer was bundled with Windows.[70] This led to the United States v. Microsoft Corporation antitrust lawsuit. IE3, released in 1996, added support for Java applets, ActiveX, and CSS. At this point, Microsoft began bundling IE with Windows. IE3 managed to increase Microsoft's share of the browser market from under 10% to over 20%.[71] IE4, released the following year, introduced Dynamic HTML setting the stage for the Web 2.0 revolution. By 1998, IE was able to capture the majority of the desktop browser market.[60] It would be the dominant browser for the next fourteen years. Google released their Chrome browser in 2008 with the first JIT JavaScript engine, V8. Chrome overtook IE to become the dominant desktop browser in four years,[72] and overtook Safari to become the dominant mobile browser in two.[73] At the same time, Google open sourced Chrome's codebase as Chromium.[74] Ryan Dahl used Chromium's V8 engine in 2009 to power an event driven runtime system, Node.js, which allowed JavaScript code to be used on servers as well as browsers. This led to the development of new software stacks such as MEAN. Thanks to frameworks such as Electron, developers can bundle up node applications as standalone desktop applications such as Slack. Acer and Samsung began selling Chromebooks, cheap laptops running Chrome OS capable of running web apps, in 2011. Over the next decade, more companies offered Chromebooks. Chromebooks outsold MacOS devices in 2020 to become the second most popular OS in the world.[75] Other notable web browsers emerged including Mozilla's Firefox, Opera's Opera browser and Apple's Safari.
1994-2003