There are more than 6 billion pages indexed on the Web, most of which use HTML coding. Without this standard markup language of the World Wide Web, who knows what the internet would look like today.
Let’s take a look at the history of HTML.
What is HTML?
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. Hypertext is text that contains embedded links to other parts of the text. On the Web, this means the links you click to go to another page, called Hyperlinks.
The theory behind hypertext predates the internet though. It goes back to the 1940s with the publishing of the short story The Garden of Forking Paths. It’s considered one of the earliest inspirations for the idea of hypertext.
HTML’s design was as a successor to SGML, or Standardized General Markup Language. There’s no firm answer to the question “When was HTML invented” but it was somewhere around 1989, by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.
HTML is easier-to-understand than SGML. It used a set of structured tags that had specific meanings in how the text and other content on the page gets displayed.
One of its principles is to specify how you should lay a page out without regard to the type of display it’s viewed on. This turned out to be an important component as smartphones, tablets, and other devices got more popular. Pages work on any size screen, even if they didn’t exist when the page was originally created.
You can convert HTML to JPG or another image format if you want to see how it looks on a particular display but the page will load on any device.
HTML Version 1
While Tim Berners-Lee started work on HTML in 1989, the first official version wasn’t released until 1991. It went public alongside the World Wide Web and the web used HTML as its foundation.
The first version of HTML supported simple formatting like bold and italic text and it let you link from one web page to another but it was extremely limited compared to what we have today.
Pages were very plain, with little ability to create custom layouts. Web pages looked like printed pages, only on a computer screen instead of paper.
HTML Version 2
HTML 2 launched several years later in 1995. It added support for queries so web pages could support things like keyword searches.
It also added support for forms, giving websites the ability to collect information from visitors and send the responses to the server. This opened doors for more commercial pursuits since companies could use forms for lead capture, customer questions, and customer feedback.
HTML Version 3
Work began on HTML 3 in early 1995. It was a major upgrade from version 2, with a focus on formatting and layout features.
HTML 3 added support for CSS or cascading style sheets. CSS is another markup language, completely separate from HTML, that contains information about how to format the content of a web page.
Web pages started to look less like a wall of text and more like the web we see today. Site navigation, text formatting, fonts, and other layout options gave designers a lot more creative control.
The CSS code was embedded in each page on a website though, making it fairly inefficient. Every page typically used the same CSS code so it would get multiplied by the number of pages on a site.
HTML Version 4
HTML 4 was released in December 1997. It cleaned up some of the loose ends from version 3. One of the biggest changes was support for external style sheets.
Instead of repeating the same CSS code on every page, that code could go in a separate file and included with a single line of code. This reduced the size of the pages and helped speed up many websites.
HTML 4 also added support for more advanced frames, scripts, and embedded objects. Table and form support also got much more powerful. While HTML was still a text markup language at its core, it was moving towards more multimedia and interactivity.
Some tags were marked as deprecated, or not recommended, in version 4. They were still supported and continued to work but it was a sign that they were living on borrowed time. Using them for new web designs was a bit risky.
HTML Version 5
HTML 5, which is the current major version, launched in October 2014. It has much stricter syntax requirements and many of the tags marked as “not recommended” in version 4 aren’t supported at all.
HTML 5 also has better multimedia support and improved scripting support for languages like JavaScript. The modern web uses these technologies for web apps like Google Docs and Office 365 and having them directly supported in HTML helps with both stability and performance.
Version 5 also added new elements that make the code easier to understand.
The World Wide Web Consortium
The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, was founded in 1994 to oversee the development of HTML and other web technologies. Its mission is “To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web.”
The W3C helped standardize HTML across the web, no matter what web browser or operating system you use. In the early days, several large companies were planning to create their own custom versions of HTML and without the W3C, the web we know today might not exist.
You might have had to use different browsers to view web pages from different sites or macOS users might not have been able to view pages intended for Windows.
The History of HTML is Ongoing
The internet is still a relatively new platform and the history of HTML is still being written. As new technologies come along, HTML will keep evolving to keep up.
And while HTML is one of the most widely-supported document formats, people use many others in day-to-day computing. And if you need to send a document to someone else, there’s no guarantee they can open it.
Fortunately, you can convert a lot of those formats to another type of file. OffDrive.com offers free online file conversion between many popular filetypes. Visit our site today to convert files for home, school, or work.