History of HTML

Inception

Founder of the internet and pioneer Tim Berners-Lee was the original inventor of HyperText Markup Language or HTML. It is a language based on Standard Generalized Mark-up Language or SGML, which is essentially a language which can be used on any machine with any browser by using a set of standard tags. These tags are paired, with a few exceptions, thus <h1>This is a page title </h1>. SGML did not include web links and as such the href attribute of the anchor tag (<a>) was entirely dreamed up by Tim. The idea that this language was based on a prior incarnation meant it was much more easily accepted into the developer community.

HTML+

During 1991 the WWW-talk mailing list was opened as a discussion group to steer the direction of this new technology, with many early computer researchers and hobbyists pitching in to the debate. One such researcher, Dave Raggett, from Hewlett-Packard in the UK trawled printed publications to visualise how this might be transformed into online HTML. In 1992, after discussions with Tim, Dave began creating HTML+, which was the next version of HTML.

Mosaic

Simultaneously, Joseph Hardin and Dave Thompson, researchers from Illinois, became interested in Tim and Dave's work. They logged into Tim's lab at CERN and download freely available browsers which sparked their interest. Consequently the pair began work on their own web browser, called Mosaic. This browser included an implementation of the img tag, introduced by Marc Andreessen, for use with images within HTML documents. Later this work became widely debated on WWW-talk and eventually accepted and is still in use today.

Text based browsers

The first text-based browser was written by Lou Montulli at Lynx during 1993, in the pre Microsoft Windows era.

Arena

In late 1993 version one of the Mosaic browser is released for Sun Microsystem's machines. It includes many new features, including forms, lists and support for images, but these are rudimentary. Meanwhile, Dave Raggett's progress building his new browser, called Arena, was slow due to lack of funding by major investors sceptical on the future of the internet. This was largely due to the misconception that it was a place largely for academics. However, he continues to work on it at home at the living room computer on the dining table, munching his children's cookies.

In 1994, Mosaic gets signed over to Spyglass Inc. and the first World Wide Web conference is held in Geneva. It saw normally shy and retiring academics buzzing with interest over this new technology. Also in this year the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) starts up the HTML working group. The group is set up to provide a forum for network designers, developers, researchers and sellers to ensure the smooth progression of the Internet. Also in 1994 HTML 2 is released, including a document type definition (which is a mathematical description of the language) and the immensely successful Netscape is formed by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark. However thhe success of the Netscape browser led to their development of specific tags in the HTML language without discussion with the HTML working group or the community. Later this year saw the start up of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

New tags

1995 sees the language extended with many new tags including font and body, using font tags to change the appearance of a page was widely criticised by the academic community as this was outside the scope of the language. Also in 1995, Microsoft Internet Explorer is released and Netscape submits a proposal for use of frames in web pages. Other important developments are work towards a web standard for using universal code across browsers and implementations of style sheets.

Cougar

During 1997 the HTML working group began work on the new version of HTML, originally dubbed Cougar, but later to become HTML 4. This implementation includes help for the disabled and visually impaired, improved style sheet support and scripting.

The fall and rise of the browsers

During the period 1998-2001 saw the dotcom boom, where Netscape rose and fell and Microsoft emerged as the dominant browser manufacturer. In recent years open source browsers such as Firefox and Opera have made up much of that ground and these seem to adhere much better to web standards based coding than MS IE. Semantic coding, by separating the aesthetic aspects of the webpage into the stylesheet and leaving HTML for the structure is much more the emphasis of late.

HTML 5

Work on a new version of HTML is in progress at time of writing, you can keep up to date on it here:
HTML 5



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