The Web, which adds an ease-of-use layer to the Internet by providing a graphical user interface (GUI), was developed in 1990 by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee (1955-), who wrote the Web software at the CERN physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Berners-Lee wrote a program defining hypertext markup language (HTML), hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), and universal resource locators (URLs). The Web became part of the Internet in 1991 and has played a major role in the growing popularity of the international computer network, making information more accessible to the user via multimedia interfaces, which allow the presentation of graphics (formatted text and hyperlinks, photos, and illustrations) as well as streaming or downloadable audio and video.