HTML history is not too much in past. It started in early twenties and emerged as an application of SGML. It stands for Hyper Text Markup Language is the standard solution to create markup for websites and applications.
The web-browsers render the markup provided by a web server or locally. Wisely talking, HTML is the core building block of any web-page. Which is essential to enable web-pages to display anything over to user. Usually HTML document consists of Headings, paragraphs, links, images, forms, lists, tables, etc.
HTML does not require any compiler rather it is compiled with a browser. We can write code using tags, e.g. <p>, <h1>, <img />, the browser do not display tags, instead browser interprets these tags sequentially and structurally to show the output on the screen. HTML alone worths nothing today, instead we code it alongside CSS and Javascript. The CSS changes the display of HTML blocks while Javascript changes the block behaviors.
HTML is the language that powers the Web in many respects, as the lingua franca that Web browsers are expected to be able to render. HTML has had unprecedented levels of success, and the uptake is all the more surprising when you realise that it was only invented in 1990, and few people knew about it before 1993.
In fact, although HTML has changed relatively little since those early days, the history of HTML is rather cloudy. However, with a little detective work on the Web, it is possible to reconstruct most of the events that led to the creation and subsequent deployment and acception of HTML.
HTML was initially created by Berners-Lee in late 1991, “HTML 2.0” was the first standard HTML specification which was published in 1995.
In late 1999, HTML 4.01 version was published and it was widely used over the web, Currently we are having HTML-5 version which was published in 2012.
Interesting to share i.e. if you understand a historical background of any topic, then it is easy for you to understand the topic in a given period of time. So, this chapter give a brief historical account of HTML.
Tim Berners-Lee, who was a physicist, was the master mind behind the concept of HTML.
In 1980, Mr. Lee proposed a prototyped ‘ENQUIRE,’ which was a system to use and share documents internally.
Further, in 1989, Mr. Lee drafted a memo, in which he proposed an Internet-based hypertext system and specified it as HTML.
CERN is the abbreviation for the European Organization for Nuclear Research in English.
Before the invention of HTML, Tim-Berners-Lee was working as a contractor in the CERN in 1980, he created the ENQUIRE software to share the documents. This software was a simple HyperText program.
Likewise, in late 1990s, Mr. Lee has written the browser and server software.
By the late 1990s, HTML became pretty known computer language; however, since 1996, the HTML stipulations have been maintained, with input from commercial software vendors, i.e. by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).