User:TLBateson/sandbox

History 1988 - 2000

Although web design has a fairly recent history, it can be linked to other areas such as graphic design. However web design is also seen as 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 and music.

The Start of the Web and Web Design

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 (). Throughout 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 were naturally text heavy. There had been no integrated approach to graphical 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 and 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 java script. 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 regards 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. The browser’s wars saw Microsoft and Netscape battle it out for the ultimate browser dominance. During this time there were many advancements in the field. For example new technologies such as Java Script, Cascading Style Sheets and Dynamic HTML were created. On a whole the battle wars did lead to many positive creations and helped web design evolve as a rapid pace.

Web Design Evolving

In 1996 Microsoft released its first competitive browser, which was complete with its own features and tags. It was also the first browser to support style sheets, which at the time was seen as an obscure authoring technique. CSS was introduced in December 1996 by the W3C to improve web accessibility and to make HTML code semantic rather than presentational. Table-based layouts became very popular as they gave web designers more options for creating websites. The HTML markup for tables was originally for displaying tabular data. However designers quickly realised the potential of what structural elements they could add to their designs. They soon created more complicated, multi-column layouts than HTML was originally capable of. However this time did see little attention been shown towards to the semantics and web accessibility. As design and good aesthetics seemed to take precedence over good mark-up structure. This period also saw Space GFIs become very popular for controlling whitespaces of web layouts. HTML sites were limited in their design options, even more so with earlier versions of HTML. To create complex designs, many web designers had to use complicated table structures or even use spacer images. However in 1996 Flash (originally known as FutureSplash) was developed. At the time it was of a very simple layout basic tools and a timeline but it enabled web designers to go beyond the point of HTML at the time. It has now progressed to be very powerful, enabling it to develop entire sites.

End of The First Browser Wars

During 1998 Netscape releases its communicator code under an open source licence. This was seen s a bold move as it enabled thousands of developers to participate in improving communication. However they decided to stop and start from the beginning, which guided the development of the open source browser and soon expanded to a complete application platform. 2000 was a big year for Microsoft. Internet Explorer had been released for Mac, this was significant as it was the first browser that fully supported HTML 4.01 and CSS 1, this did raise the bar in terms of the standards compliance. It was also the first browser to full support the PNG format. During this time Netscape was sold to AOL and this was seen as Netscape’s official loss to Microsoft in the browser wars.