In 1989, whilst working at CERN Tim Berners-Lee proposed to create a global hypertext project, which later became known as the World Wide Web. During 1991 to 1993 the World Wide Web was born. Text-only pages could be viewed using a simple line-mode browser. In 1993 Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, created the Mosaic browser. At the time there were multiple browsers, however the majority of them were Unix-based and naturally text heavy. There had been no integrated approach to graphic design elements such as images or sounds. The Mosaic browser broke this mould. The W3C was created in October 1994 to "lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability." This discouraged any one company from monopolizing a propriety browser and programming language, which could have altered the effect of the World Wide Web as a whole. The W3C continues to set standards, which can today be seen with JavaScript and other languages. In 1994 Andreessen formed Mosaic Communications Corp. that later became known as Netscape Communications, the Netscape 0.9 browser. Netscape created its own HTML tags without regard to the traditional standards process. For example, Netscape 1.1 included tags for changing background colours and formatting text with tables on web pages. Throughout 1996 to 1999 the browser wars began, as Microsoft and Netscape fought for ultimate browser dominance. During this time there were many new technologies in the field, notably Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, and Dynamic HTML. On the whole, the browser competition did lead to many positive creations and helped web design evolve at a rapid pace.
1988–2001
Although web design has a fairly recent history. It can be linked to other areas such as graphic design, user experience, and multimedia arts, but is more aptly seen from a technological standpoint. It has become a large part of people's everyday lives. It is hard to imagine the Internet without animated graphics, different styles of typography, background, videos and music.
In 2009 there were reportedly 1.73 billion users worldwide with Asia taking leading with 738,257,230 users. Other internet users by region and continent include;
Following modernization, better access to computers, growth in smartphones technology and use, social media popularity, and cheaper access to the internet, the number of internet users worldwide increased tremendously to 3.97 in 2019. This represents over 51 percent of the global population, with Asia remaining the continent with the most internet users as it accounts for 50 percent of the total number of internet users worldwide. China has the most internet users in the Asian continent, accounting for 25 percent of users in Asia. Also, China has more internet users than any other country in the world with over 934 million monthly users as at 2020. This number is more than double the number of internet users in the US which ranked third with 284 million monthly online users. India ranked second with about 687 million internet users accessing the internet either through mobile devices or computers. One of the most popular activities online is social networking. In 2020, Facebook, a social networking site founded by Mark Zuckerberg recorded over 2.7 billion monthly active users. This number accounts for over half of global internet users, making Facebook the most popular online social network.
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