History of Web Design and Development

World Wide Web - The First Browser - 1990 December 

Tim Berners, a British physicist and internet pioneer, created the world's first web browser called World Wide Web at CERN (a Swiss research center). The browser was a simple WYSIWYG editor for web pages.

The First Website - 1991 August

Tim Berners, the World Wide Web creator,  started the world's first website.

HTML Tags - 1991 October

The internet inventor, Tim Berners, published a document called HTML Tags. The document described the first 18 HTML tags.

The First HTML Tags Document

HTTP v0.9 - 1991 November

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an Internet protocol designed to exchange hypertext documents (images, websites, etc.) between the server and the web browser. The first Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) design version 0.9, was created by Tim Berners as part of the WWW specification. The HTTP v0.9 was very simple, using only the GET method with one parameter, i.e. the name of the requested document.

The First Web Server in USA - 1991 December

A particle physicist / software developer Paul Kunz started first web server in Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), USA. Paul Kunz was inspired by the World Wide Web project from its creator Tim Berners, whom he met in person at the CERN Swiss Research Center.

Mosaic 1.0 - 1993 November

Students Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina from the University of Illinois developed one of the first GUI based web browser. Mosaic worked on multiple platforms and gained worldwide popularity shortly after being launched. Mosaic officially ended in January, 1997.

Mosaic 1.0 Web Browser

Aliweb - 1993 November

A Dutch software engineer Martijn Koster introduced Aliweb search engine (Archie-Like Indexing in the Web) designed for the World Wide Web service. In May 1994, Aliweb was introduced at the first international WWW conference at CERN Research Center in Geneva. Aliweb did not have a web crawler to index web pages. Sites were added to database on request from users using their exact description and location.

Yahoo! - 1994 January

Two students from Stanford University, Jerry Yang and David Filo, created Yahoo. Yahoo is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”. In March 1995, the Yahoo search engine was started as part of the portal.

W3C.org - 1994 October

Tim Berners-Lee founded an international organization called World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The main objective of the consortium is the development of Web standards for the World Wide Web (WWW). For example, W3C developed standards for HTML, XHML, XML, or CSS markup languages. Another aim of the organization is education and development of Web Accessibility Rules (WCAG).

Netscape 0.9 - 1994 October

The Netscape Communications Corporation announced a browser named Netscape 0.9, called Netscape Navigator in the subsequent versions. Netscape 0.9 and Netscape Navigator 1.0 (released later) became widely popular internationally.

PHP 1.0 - 1995 June

Rasmus Lerdorf, the Danish-Canadian programmer, designed the first version of PHP 1.0 scripting language. PHP initially stood for Personal Home Page. In 1997, Israeli developers Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski modified the initial parser to create the basis for PHP 3. They also changed the name of the language to a recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

PHP Version 1.0 Personal Homepage Tools

Amazon.com - 1995 July

Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos initially as an online bookstore and later expanded to many different products. Later, Amazon purchased the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and Alexa.com web service. Today, a cloud platform called Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon Kindle e-reader are one of its major products.

Internet Explorer 1.0 - 1995 August

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1.0 for Windows 95. The original Windows 95 did not include a web browser, as Microsoft underestimated the potential of the rapidly developing Internet. The source code for Internet Explorer 1.0 was based on Mosaic browser for which Microsoft bought license rights. Internet Explorer 1.0 took only 1 MB of disk space and it had limited features.

eBay - 1995 September

Pierre Omidyar, an Iranian-American programmer, developed a simple auction website called AuctionWeb. In September 1997, the website was renamed to eBay. In 2002, eBay introduced PayPal online payment system and in 2005, eBay bought Skype VoIP.

Netscape Navigator 2.0 - 1995 September

The Netscape Communications Corporation launched Netscape Navigator 2.0 including a wide range of features, such as, JavaScript, animated GIFs, various HTML tags.

FrontPage 1.0 - 1995 November

Vermeer Technologies introduced the FrontPage 1.0 editor for WYSIWYG web development. Microsoft bought Vermeer in 1996 and released Microsoft FrontPage 1.1.

FrontPage 1.0

HTML 2.0 - 1995 November

IETF published RFC 1866 specification for HTML 2.0. HTML 2.0 introduced forms, tables, graphics, and a number of new tags, such as <!DOCTYPE>, <head>, <body>, <form>, <img>, <input>, <select>, <strong> etc.

Adobe PageMill 1.0 - 1995 December

Adobe Systems released a WYSIWYG HTML editor called Adobe PageMill 1.0. The editor allowed users to easily create websites without any knowledge of the basics of HTML.

Lynda.com - 1995 December

Lynda Weinman, a computer instructor and graphic designer, launched one of the first online libraries of training courses for web developers at lynda.com.

JavaScript 1.0 - 1995 December

Brendan Eich of Netscape developed the first version of JavaScript which became popular to create interactive websites. JavaScript was standardized by ISO in 1998.

AltaVista - 1995 December

A team of researchers led by Louise Monier and Michael Burrows created the AltaVista search engine. Due to high-performance hardware, AltaVista was able to perform full-text search across a wide range of websites quickly. In 1997, the first free online translator Babel Fish became part of AltaVista. In 2003, AltaVista was purchased by Yahoo! and in 2013, AltaVista project was terminated.

AltaVista Website in 1996 

JScript 1.0 - 1996 August

Microsoft implemented JavaScript into Internet Explorer 3.0 under the name JScript 1.0. By changing the name to JScript, Microsoft wanted to avoid potential patent litigation with Sun Microsystems, which created the Java programming language.

ASP 1.0 - 1996 December

Microsoft developed Active Server Pages (ASP 1.0), a server-side script engine for dynamically generated websites. A distinctly modified and improved ASP technology, ASP.NET 1.0, was released in January 2002.

CSS 1 - 1996 December

W3C issued language specification, Cascading Style Sheets, level 1 (CSS1), describing how to display elements in documents written in HTML, XHTML, and XML. In 1997, a Norwegian programmer Håkon Wium Lie and a Dutch developer Bert Bos published one of the first cascading style books titled Cascading style sheets: designing for the Web.

Cascading Style Sheets, Level 1, W3C Recommendation

Macromedia Flash 1.0 - 1996 December

In December 1996, Macromedia purchased FutureWave Software, which was working on FutureSplash animator. The program was used to create vector animations that could be played with the FutureSplash Viewer plugin in the then popular Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. In 1996, Macromedia released an enhanced version of this program called Macromedia Flash 1.0.

HTML 3.2 - 1997 January

W3C issued a final recommendation specifying the HTML 3.2 markup language. The original HTML 3.0 version had never become a standard, as it was too complicated, and the leading Microsoft and Netscape developers had a problem implementing it. In the HTML 3.2 specification, among others, new tags appeared, such as <center>, <div>, <font>, <script>, <style>.

WAI - 1997 April

As part of the W3C consortium, the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) officially launched its activity. The main goal of the WAI project is to improve the accessibility of websites and WWW services for users with disabilities.

SEO - 1997 May

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term indicating a set of techniques and rules that are applied to provide a better position of websites in search results for selected keywords. The first use of the term is not fully documented. According to Danny Sullivan, founder of Search Engine Watch, the term Search Engine Optimization first appeared in May 1997.

Netscape Communicator 4.0 - 1997 June

At the time of the culmination of the first browser war, Netscape released Netscape Communicator 4.0, a web application suite. It included, for example, Netscape Navigator 4.0 web browser with CSS 1 support, Netscape Messenger email client, Netscape Composer HTML editor and Netscape Calendar. In January 1998, Netscape announced that the subsequent versions of the software will be developed as open source projects under Mozilla and will be available to users free of charge.

Internet Explorer 4.0 - 1997 September

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4.0. IE 4.0 was integrated into the Windows 95 and Windows 98 operating systems and was freely available for the Mac OS, Solaris and HP-UX platforms. The distribution methods and integration of Internet Explorer into Windows subsequently became one of the subjects of legal proceedings between the US government and Microsoft over the abuse of a dominant market position. Internet Explorer 4.0 gained more than 60% market share at the beginning of 1999, contributing significantly to Microsoft winning over Netscape in the so-called first browser war.

DHTML - 1997 October

The term Dynamic HTML (DHTML) was first introduced in connection with the release of Internet Explorer 4.0. It did not refer to a new stand-alone language, but only a combination of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript technology to enhance interactivity and website dynamics.

Dreamweaver 1.0 - 1997 December

Macromedia released the first version of the popular Dreamweaver 1.0 website editor. The editor allowed users to switch between text and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) mode. The first version of the Dreamweaver editor was only available for Mac OS, and in March 1998, a version for Windows was released.

Dreamweaver 1.2

HTML 4.0 - 1997 December

W3C published official recommendations for the HTML 4.0 specification. The HTML 4.0 specification was divided into three variants: Strict, Transitional, and Frameset, and its aim was to separate the HTML semantics and the document layout (formatted using only CSS) into two separate parts. In December 1999, recommendations were published for a revised version, HTML 4.01.

XML 1.0 - 1998 February

W3C published the final recommendation for the XML 1.0 specification. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a general markup language designed to easily exchange information between applications and to publish documents that contain at least partially structured data. XML is a simplified subset of the older SGML language. The XML language does not deal with document layout and consistently separates form and content. For different types of data, XML allows you to create custom markup languages ​​(applications). By combining XML with HTML, the new XHTML markup language was created in 2000.

Mozilla - 1998 February

Netscape Communications Corporation released the source code of the Netscape Communicator 5.0 web browser, which became the beginning of a community-based open source project called Mozilla. In 2003, the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization, was founded on the basis of the original project.

CSS2 - 1998 May

W3C issued official recommendations for CSS2 specification. The second cascade style specification included a number of new features such as absolute, relative and fixed positioning of elements, z-index for element overlap, minimum and maximum width or height of elements, type of media, etc. In June 2011, W3C published a revision of the second version of cascading styles, CSS 2.1.

DMOZ.org - 1998 June

Sun Microsystems developers Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel created a non-commercial, multilingual catalog of websites entitled the Open Directory Project (ODP or DMOZ, based on the original domain, directory.mozilla.org). The content of the catalog was created and maintained by a community of volunteers, and it was one of the largest internet catalogs at the time. The DMOZ project was owned by AOL for most of its duration. The project ended its activity on March 17, 2017.

Google - 1998 September

A pair of Ph.D. students from Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created the Google search engine. Google originally started as a research project whose aim was to find relevant search results using a mathematical algorithm. The algorithm, later called PageRank, analyzed relationships between individual webpages based on their cross-references, thus assessing their importance. The name Google is a deliberate misspelling of the word googol, which refers to a very high number – 1 followed by a hundred zeros (10100).

Google in 1998

Favicon - 1999 March

Favicon (a combination of the words favorite and icon) first appeared in Internet Explorer 5.0. The term favicon refers to a webpage icon that appeared in older browsers in the address bar next to the URL or in favorites. Originally, favicon had to be placed in the root directory of the website under the name favicon.ico, and its dimensions were typically 16x16 px or 32x32 px. In December 1999, favicon was standardized by W3C in the recommendation for HTML 4.01.

Internet Explorer 5.0 - 1999 March

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 5.0. The browser was integrated into the Windows 98 SE operating system, and version 5.01 was part of Windows 2000. In July 2000, Internet Explorer 5.5 was released, integrated into Windows ME. Internet Explorer 5.0 was also tied to Microsoft Office 2000. At the beginning of 2000, the fifth version of Internet Explorer had more than 50% market share. Internet Explorer 5.0 thus became one of the key participants in the first browser war.

Web 2.0 - 1999 April

Darcy DiNucci published an article entitled "Fragmented Future" in the Print magazine, in which the term Web 2.0 was first introduced. The term refers to the development phase of the Web in which the content of websites is created and shared primarily by the users themselves. Typical Web 2.0 examples include social networking sites, web forums, internet encyclopedias, or photo/video sharing portals. In 2004, Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty held the first Web 2.0 conference, during which the term Web 2.0 was brought to the attention of a wider public.

WCAG 1.0 - 1999 May

W3C, in co-operation with the WAI initiative, issued the first recommendation for a set of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0). The WCAG 1.0 consists of 14 general rules that represent the basic principles of accessibility. In addition to these rules, WCAG 1.0 also includes checkpoints that explain given problems. Each checkpoint is assigned a priority on the following scale: the highest (priority 1), medium (priority 2) or lower (priority 3).

Blogger.com - 1999 August

Pyra Labs launched one of the oldest blogging tools at Blogger.com. The new blogging platform gained a large community of users in the subsequent years. In February 2003, Blogger.com was bought by Google.

XHTML 1.0 - 2000 January

W3C issued official recommendations for the XHTML 1.0 specification. The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) is a markup language for creating hypertext documents in an Internet environment. XHTML originated from an integration of XML and HTML and was divided into three versions: Strict, Transitional, and Frameset. According to W3C’s original plans, XHTML was supposed to be the successor to HTML, whose development was completed by version 4.01. However, in 2007, a new version of HTML started being developed, labeled HTML5.

PHP 4.0 and Zend Engine - 2000 May

A pair of Israeli programmers, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, completely rewrote the interpreter used in PHP and created version PHP 4.0. PHP 4.0 is based on an open source scripting engine called Zend Engine. The name Zend is a composite of its creators’ names Zeev and Andi. The Zend Engine is written as a highly optimized and powerful backend that can also be used outside PHP applications.

Macromedia Flash 5.0 and ActionScript 1.0 - 2000 August

Macromedia launched the Macromedia Flash 5.0 multimedia software. It was the first version in which ActionScript 1.0 object-oriented programming language was fully implemented. Older versions of Macromedia Flash contained only sets of very simple programming commands. Thanks to ActionScript 1.0, users could create complex web applications or more complicated animations. ActionScript is based on a standardized JavaScript version called ECMAScript.

Wikipedia - 2001 January

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia, a multilingual internet encyclopedia. The content of the encyclopedia is shared under a free and open license of the Creative Commons. Volunteer contributors from around the world participate in the creation of Wikipedia entries. Wikipedia’s precursor was the Nupedia web encyclopedia, to which, unlike Wikipedia, only experts were allowed to contribute. At the beginning of 2018, Wikipedia contained articles written in nearly 300 languages.

Internet Explorer 6.0 - 2001 August

Less than two months before the official release of the Windows XP operating system, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 6.0. IE 6 was integrated into Windows XP and was also compatible with previous versions of the system down to Windows 98. Despite a significant amount of security flaws and lack of support for web standards, Internet Explorer 6.0 gained more than 80% market share in 2004. Together with earlier versions of IE 5.0 and IE 5.5, the proportion of Internet Explorer browsers in 2004 was more than 90%.

SVG 1.0 - 2001 September

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a graphical vector file format based on the XML markup language. SVG has become the basic open format for vector graphics on web pages. The SVG format has been developed since 1998 by W3C and is currently fully supported by all major browsers.

Wayback Machine - 2001 October

The Internet Archive organization launched a free digital archive of websites for the general public called the Wayback Machine. The oldest pages stored in the archive date back to 1996. In September 2020, the Wayback Machine maintained more than 468 billion versions of websites from various time intervals.

Mozilla 1.0 - 2002 June

Mozilla (also known as Mozilla.org) released the Mozilla 1.0 web browser. The basis for Mozilla 1.0 was Gecko, an open source rendering engine which significantly improved the support of web standards.

WordPress 0.7 - 2003 May

Web developers Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little created the first version of the open source content management system called WordPress 0.7. The publishing system is based on PHP and MySQL technology and is developed under the GNU GPL free software license. The predecessor of WordPress was the b2/cafelog blogging platform. WordPress is currently the most popular content management system, and more than 30% of websites are using it worldwide.

Safari 1.0 - 2003 June

Apple introduced its own web browser, Safari 1.0. The browser uses the WebKit renderer to display website content. Safari 1.0 was initially available for download as a standalone program, but, in October 2003, it became the default Mac OS X 10.3 operating system browser.

MySpace - 2003 August

Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe founded the MySpace social network. Its concept was inspired by the then popular social network called Friendster. MySpace popularity skyrocketed, and by February 2004, the network had acquired one million users. Between 2004 and 2010, MySpace was one of the largest social networks worldwide. In April 2008, however, the number of unique monthly users was surpassed by Facebook, and since then the popularity of MySpace has been on a continuous decline.

Flickr - 2004 February

Ludicorp launched a photo sharing community website called Flickr. In March 2005, Flickr was bought by Yahoo!. Flickr is a typical representative of Web 2.0, which means that the content of the website is created and shared primarily by the users themselves. Flickr was one of the first community websites which allowed tagging of photographs. In 2015, the number of photos posted on Flickr exceeded 10 billion.

CSS Sprites - 2004 March

In “A List Apart” webzine, Dave Shea published an article entitled "CSS Sprite: Image Slicing's Kiss of Death." In the article, the author described a technique called CSS Sprites, the basis of which was to connect several smaller graphic elements into one larger image. The graphic elements are then placed on the website using the background-position feature. Thanks to CSS Sprites, a website loads faster because it only uploads one image, reducing the number of HTTP requests.

Mozilla Firefox 1.0 - 2004 November

Mozilla Corporation released a multiplatform web browser, Firefox 1.0. Compared with browsers from the Internet Explorer family, Firefox 1.0 was characteristic for its higher security, better web standards support, and a number of plug-ins that could be additionally installed. As a result, Firefox gained major popularity among users and exceeded 1 billion downloads between 2004 and 2009. The name Firefox was allegedly derived from the English translation of the Chinese name for the red panda.

YouTube - 2005 February

Three former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, launched the YouTube website for publishing and sharing video files. The first video called "Me at the zoo" was uploaded to YouTube on 23 April, 2005 by one of the co-founders, Jawed Karim. It was a short video from the San Diego zoo. In November 2006, YouTube was purchased by Google for $ 1.65 billion.

Reddit - 2005 June

Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian established the Reddit social network. Users on Reddit submit or share content that is then rated by the community. Content is divided into thematic categories called subreddits. The name Reddit is a play on the phrase "I read it".

Google Analytics - 2005 November

In April 2005, Google took over the Urchin Software Corporation, which was developing a tool for the acquisition of statistical data about website users. In November 2005, Google launched an enhanced version of this tool under the name Google Analytics. Since 2006, the basic version of this service has been available for free. Website owners can track traffic, analyze user behavior, and record conversions. Google Analytics is currently the most widely used web analytics tool.

Adobe Purchased Macromedia - 2005 December

Adobe Systems bought its rival company, Macromedia, for $ 3.4 billion. Programs such as ColdFusion, Captivate, Director, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Flex, FreeHand, and HomeSite were added to the Adobe software portfolio.

jQuery - 2006 January

The software engineer John Resig announced the creation of the jQuery JavaScript library at BarCamp NYC. The jQuery library emphasizes interaction between JavaScript and HTML. jQuery makes it easy for web developers to create recurring events, animations, or manipulate cascading style sheets.

Smashing Magazine - 2006 August

Sven Lennartz and Vitaly Friedman created a portal for web designers and developers called Smashing Magazine. The portal provides regular news from the world of web design, user experience, or web development. Smashing Magazine also publishes research publications and organizes regular conferences and workshops. Smashing Magazine is currently the most visited web site for web design and related fields.

CSS Grid - 2007 September

W3C released the first proposal of the CSS Grid specification. This CSS module defines a set of properties for creating a layout fitted into a regular grid that consists of rows and columns. The CSS Grid makes it easy to create complex and full-page layouts without the need of using cascading style layout methods involving float and positioning. CSS Grid features are currently supported by most major browsers.

Google Chrome - 2008 September

Google released the beta version of Google Chrome's freeware browser for Windows. In December 2008, the first stable version of Google Chrome 1.0 was released. Since January 2009, Chrome has been available for MacOS, and in February 2012, its first beta version for Android 4 was released. At the turn of April and May 2012, Chrome surpassed the popularity of Internet Explorer and became the most widely used web browser. In 2018, Google Chrome had more than 66% of the global market share.

WCAG 2.0 - 2008 December

W3C issued official recommendations for a second set of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0). WCAG 2.0 is divided into 4 basic principles, according to which the content and web control features must be perceptible, operable, understandable and robust enough to work with today's and future technologies. The basic principles of WCAG 2.0 consist of 12 general rules that are linked to the control criteria for which web content can be tested. There are three levels which refer to the extent to which the content satisfies the requirements: A (lowest), AA, AAA (highest).

WOFF 1.0 - 2010 April

Mozilla Foundation, Opera Software and Microsoft submitted a proposal for the specification of a new Web Open Font Format (WOFF) to the W3C. The WOFF fonts are currently supported by all major browsers.

Google Web Fonts - 2010 May

Google launched an open source web font library, Google Web Fonts (now called Google Fonts). Fonts are hosted on Google's servers, and the library now has nearly 900 font families that users can use on their websites for free.

Responsive Web Design - 2010 May

Web designer Ethan Marcotte published an article entitled "Responsive Web Design" in the online magazine A List Apart. The author describes a new way of styling HTML documents which allows for an optimization of website content display with regard to resolution or display size. Basic responsive web design techniques include fluid grid, flexible images, and CSS3 module media queries.

Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte

Bootstrap 1 - 2011 August

Web developers Mark Otto and Jacob Thorton of Twitter began creating the CSS framework Bootstrap in mid-2011. The framework was originally developed to help maintain the HTML/CSS and JavaScript code consistency in Twitter applications. In August 2011, Bootstrap 1 was released as an open source tool and is currently one of the most popular CSS frameworks among web designers. In January 2012, Bootstrap 2 was released, supporting a responsive web layout.

Bootstrap 3 - 2013 August

A team of developers from GitHub published the CSS framework Boostrap 3. The new Bootstrap version consistently applied a responsive web layout and mobile-first access. The layout of templates and components was redesigned in flat design style.

HTML5 - 2014 October

W3C adopted the final recommendation for the HTML5 markup language. The HTML5 version has brought an improved browser multimedia playback support, new semantic tags that better define page structure, offline application support, and the <canvas> tag that can interpret vector graphics with an option to insert images.

HTML5 W3C Recommendation 2014

Microsoft Edge - 2015 March

Microsoft released the first version of the Microsoft Edge web browser for Windows 10. Microsoft Edge was subsequently included as a default browser on Windows 10 Mobile and Xbox One operating systems, definitively replacing the older Internet Explorer 11 and Internet Explorer Mobile browsers. On December 6, 2018, Microsoft announced that Edge will no longer use its own EdgeHTML rendering engine and will be based on Chromium, Google's open source rendering engine.

Progressive Web Apps - 2015

In 2015, designer Frances Berriman and Google Chrome engineer Alex Russell coined the term "progressive web apps" to describe apps taking advantage of new features supported by modern browsers, including service workers and web app manifests, that let users upgrade web apps to progressive web applications in their native operating system (OS). Google then put significant efforts into promoting PWA development for Android. With Apple's introduction of service worker support for Safari in 2017, PWAs were now supported on the two most commonly-used mobile operating systems, Android and iOS. By 2019, PWAs were available on desktop browsers Microsoft Edge (on Windows) and Google Chrome (on Windows, macOS, Chrome OS and Linux).

Accelerated Mobile Pages - 2015 October

AMP (originally an acronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open source HTML framework developed by the AMP Open Source Project. It was originally created by Google as a competitor to Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News. AMP is optimized for mobile web browsing and intended to help webpages load faster. AMP pages may be cached by a CDN, such as Microsoft Bing or Cloudflare's AMP caches, which allows pages to be served more quickly. AMP was first announced on October 7, 2015. After a technical preview period, AMP pages began appearing in Google mobile search results in February 2016. AMP was initially criticized for potentially giving further control over the web to Google. The AMP Project announced it would move to an open governance model on September 18, 2018.

AI and Chatbots - 2016

Early in 2016, we saw the introduction of the first wave of artificial intelligence technology in the form of chatbots. Social media platforms like Facebook allowed developers to create a chatbot for their brand or service so that consumers could carry out some of their daily actions from within their messaging platform. This development of A.I. technology has excited everyone, as the possibilities for the way we communicate with brands have been exponentially expanded.

Web5G - 2018 July

W3C published the report of the W3C Workshop on Web5G: Aligning evolutions of network and Web technologies, which was held on 10-11 May 2018, in London. Network Operators, vendors, application developers, content provider and standard makers participated in this event which was designed to explore how the Open Web Platform could help drive the adoption of 5G innovations from the applications layer to the network level.

Web5G Positioning

WebXR Device API - 2019 February

The Immersive Web Working Group published a first working draft of the WebXR Device API. This specification describes support for accessing virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) devices, including sensors and head-mounted displays, on the Web.

AR Headsets Could Replace Phones

Payment Request API - 2019 April

The Web Payments Working Group published an updated Candidate Recommendation of Payment Request API. This specification standardizes an API to allow merchants (i.e. web sites selling physical or digital goods) to utilize one or more payment methods with minimal integration. User agents (e.g., browsers) facilitate the payment flow between merchant and user.

Audiobook Profile for Web Publications - 2019 June

The Publishing Working Group published first working draft of Audiobook Profile for Web Publications. This profile, derived from the structure laid out in the Web Publications specification, has been developed to address a major gap in the publishing ecosystem. Unlike the ebooks industry which predominantly uses the EPUB standard, Audiobooks never developed a common specification. This has created a distribution model where content creators create many different files for their distributors or retailers, leaving users behind.

Immersive Captions Community Group - 2019 September

W3C launched Immersive Captions Community Group with a mission to identify, research, and where appropriate recommend best practices for captions in Immersive Media (Games & XR).

Sensor APIs - 2019 December

The Devices and Sensors Working Group introduced recommendations for accelerometer, gyroscope, orientation and generic sensors.

Web Real-Time Communication 1.0 API - 2019 December

The WebRTC Working Group published updated Candidate Recommendation of WebRTC 1.0: Real-time Communication Between Browsers specification. The WebRTC API enables browsers to establish real-time audio, video and data transmission between browsers and other peers.

Web Share API - 2019 December

The Web Applications Working Group published first working draft of Web Share API. This specification defines an API for sharing text, links and other content to an arbitrary destination of the user’s choice.

CSS Speech Module - 2020 March

The CSS Working Group introduced updated Candidate Recommendation of CSS Speech Module. The Speech module defines aural CSS properties that enable authors to declaratively control the rendering of documents via speech synthesis, and using optional audio cues.

WoT Architecture and WoT Thing - 2020 April

The Web of Things Working Group published Web of Things (WoT) Architecture and Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description as W3C Recommendations, thus enabling easy integration across Internet of Things platforms and applications. The WoT Architecture specification describes the abstract architecture for the W3C Web of Things, while the WoT Thing Description describes the metadata and interfaces of Things, where a Thing is an abstraction of a physical or virtual entity that provides interactions to and participates in the Web of Things.

Applications of the Web of Things (WoT) Architecture

Web Audio API - 2020 June

The Audio Working Group invited implementation of its updated Candidate Recommendation of Web Audio API. This specification describes a high-level Web API for processing and synthesizing audio in web applications.

Internet Media Subtitles and Captions 1.2 - 2020 August

The Timed Text Working Group published TTML Profiles for Internet Media Subtitles and Captions 1.2 as a W3C Recommendation. IMSC 1.2 is the latest version of the IMSC standard, which defines profiles of the Timed Text Markup Language for worldwide subtitling and captioning interchange.

WCAG 2.2 - 2020 August

The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) published a Working Draft of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 for wide review. This version has 9 new accessibility requirements (“success criteria”) since WCAG 2.1. The new success criteria address user needs of people with cognitive or learning disabilities, users of mobile devices, and users of ebooks. 

CSS Grid Layout Module Level 2 - 2020 August

The CSS Working Group published a Candidate Recommendation of CSS Grid Layout Module Level 2 and an updated Candidate Recommendation of CSS Grid Layout Module Level 1. This CSS module defines a two-dimensional grid-based layout system, optimized for user interface design. In the grid layout model, the children of a grid container can be positioned into arbitrary slots in a predefined flexible or fixed-size layout grid.

Roadmap of Web Applications on Mobile - 2020 September

W3C published a new version of its Roadmap of Web Applications on Mobile, an overview of the various technologies developed in W3C that increase the capabilities of Web applications, and how they apply more specifically to the mobile context.