Long description of the graphical timeline spanning 1994-2024
The graphical timeline was created on 2 April 2024, and is available in PDF and PNG.
The timeline spans 1994 to 2024 and shows 4 layers:
- Top: Organizational highlights
- Chronology of when selected work started or web standards were reached, that made the Web the great platform it is today
- The number of websites and Internet users every few years
- Bottom: Chronology of when selected websites or services were launched. That layer ends with select statistics from the Covid-19 pandemic.
First layer (top): W3C organizational highlights
- 1994: Creation of W3C
- 2004: W3C 10th anniversary
- 2014: W3C 20th anniversay
- 2023: Creation of W3C Inc.
- 2024: W3C 30th anniversary
Second layer: selected W3C milestones that made the Web so essential and usable
Between October 1995 and April 2024, W3C published over 13,123 specifications, of which 497 are W3C Recommendations (Web Standards).
The timeline lists some of the notable W3C achievements:
- 1995-2000: PNG, CSS, HTML, XML, WAI, DOM, I18N, Micropayments, RDF
- 2000-2005: SVG, W3C Patent Policy, Mobile Web Initiative
- 2005-2010: WCAG 2.0
- 2010-2015: WebRTC, WOFF, Web Payments Initiative, JSON-LD
- 2015-2020: ActivityPub, Web Authentication, WebAssembly, Verifiable Credentials
- 2020-2024: DIDs, WCAG 2.2
Third layer: number of websites and Internet users
- 1995: 23,500 websites, 45M users
- 2000: 17,100,000 websites, 141M users
- 2005: 64,800.00 websites, 1.03B users
- 2010: 207,000,000 websites, 2.04B users
- 2015: 863,000,000 websites, 3.1B users
- 2020: 1.75B websites, 4.5B users
- 2024: 2B webistes, 5.4B users
Fourth layer (bottom): other sites and services
Chronology of the launch of select websites or services, to put some industry context:
- 1994: Yahoo!
- 1995: Amazon, Altavista
- 1997: Netflix, Yandex
- 1998: Google
- 1999: Paypal
- 2000: Baidu
- 2001: Wikipedia
- 2003: WordPress, LinkedIn, MySpace
- 2004: Facebook, Flickr
- 2005: Youtube, Reddit
- 2006: Twitter
- 2007: Tumblr, Netflix streaming
- 2008: Dropbox
- 2010: Pinterest, Instagram
- 2011: Zoom
- 2012: Oculus VR, Google Play
- 2014: Apple CarPlay
- 2016: Mastodon, TikTok
- 2018: GDPR
- 2020: The Coronavirus pandemic caused surges in Internet traffic (+40%), Web conferencing (+300%), Video on demand (+100-200%) and Gaming (+300%)
The graphic is copyrighted W3C and was done on 2024-04-02.
Corale Mercier, Head of W3C Marketing & Communications
$Id: 2024-04-02_timeline-1994-2024.html,v 1.5 2024/04/16 12:26:43 coralie Exp $