HTML History & Information


HTML is an acronym which means Hyper Text Markup Language. If you surf around the web, you will find various definitions of HTML. To be precise, HTML is just a way of describing the format for any document to be displayed using a web browser like Internet Explorer. An html file is just a simple text file that contains various tags that defines the structure/format of the documents that can be viewed using web browsers. HTML is the first step towards web development; that is why most of the web developers start their web development learning process with HTML. HTML pages can contain simple text as well as complex multimedia items like images (static or dynamic), sound or some Java applets as well.

Messy Desk

Messy Desk

Do you know that the global publishing format, today, of the Internet that we use is HTML? HTML allows web programmers to format the text the way they want. HTML provides various tags for formatting the text like header tags, list tags, table tags and much more. Now as you have read some basic intro about HTML, let’s briefly discuss the history of this markup language.

Before the introduction of HTML, the idea of hypertext was there for quite a while. But the real effort started when various technologies, for the implementation of hypertext, came together in 1980s; one such earlier technology was HyperCard information management system by Apple. Soon, HTML was developed and it gain phenomenal popularity within no time. HTML was originally developed by Tim Berners-Lee and it got huge success because of Mosaic; a web browser that was developed at NCSA; one of the biggest US super computing centers in the world. After its introduction, HTML evolved as one of the strongest markup languages of all time and it continued to grow. HTML was then standardized in order to enable various web page authors and browser vendors, around the world, to share same conventions for HTML. HTML standards were and are created by W3C. Since its introduction, there versions of HTML have been released. Version 2.0 was released in 1994, version 3.2 was released in 1996 and version 4.0 was released in 1997.

Web Books

My Occupation

Before you can move on towards building your first html page, it would be better if you get your familiarize with what an html file is all about. An HTML file is a simple text file that can be created using any text editor like notepad etc and it contains markup tags that actually describe the format of the page to the browser. There are various tags that can be used to define the format of a web page; some of the basic tags of html are mentioned below:

  • <html>: used for defining an HTML document
  • <title>: used for defining the title for the HTML document
  • <body>: used for defining the body of the document
  • <h1> to <h6>: Headings, h1 is the largest and h6 is the smallest
  • <p>: used for defining the paragraph
  • <br>: used for inserting a line break
  • <hr>: used for defining a horizontal ruler
  • <!–>: used for inserting comments.

Now, as you know the basic tags of HTML, you can start working on your first html page. Simply follow the given steps and you would end up with a simple html page.

  • Make sure that you have a text editor like notepad or wordpad; in case of Mac, try SimpleText.
  • Enter the following code and save it with an extension of .htm or .html.

<html>
<head>
<title>Title of page</title>
</head>
<body>
My first html homepage.
</body>
</html>

  • After you have successfully saved it, you have to open your web browser; Internet Explorer or any other.
  • Click open and then browse for the page that you have just saved with an extension of .htm or .html. Once you open it, you should be able to see My First html homepage on a web page.

Don’t forget to go through our other sections for HTML that will assist you in finding valuable online learning resources and forums that will help you a lot in the learning of HTML.