What is HTML?

HTML, abbreviation for HyperText Markup Language, is the basic language of the Web. It is one of the easiest languages to learn. It is said that a person with below-normal IQ takes about 8-10 hours to learn this language. So, you can definitely learn in a couple of hours.

HTML was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, a young software engineer at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) in Switzerland. HTML is based on another markup language - SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) and is essentially a subclass of this. The basic feature of this markup language is to embed tags in the documents describing the style and appearence of the text. These tags will then be used by the software in the computer to display the document in the original format. The major advantage accruing out of this is machine-independent documents. Once you create the document in HTML, any computer (with the browser software that knows how to interpret these tags) can display the document irrespective of its hardware differences.

An example of a tag : <TITLE > What is HTML? </TITLE>

This text will display the document title 'What is HTML?' at the top of the browser window. <TITLE> is a tag.

The first version of HTML invented by Tim was known as HTML 1.0 (not surprisingly). It had nearly 30 tags and the next version (HTML 2.0) added a few more tags. A significant improvement in this version was the introduction of forms. The W3 Consortium (W3C) was formed in late 1994 with HTML as an important area of activity. By this time Netscape had begun to selectively implement a subset of HTML 3.0 proposals. The resulting incompatibility was something which the Consortium felt necessary to address, and in November 1995 the HTML ERB (Editorial Review Board) was formed to bring vendors around the same table to work collaboratively to prepare a common standard for HTML. HTML 3.2 became a W3C Recommendation in January 1997. This included tables, applets, a number of attributes in common use, and various ideas from the HTML 3.0 specification, a proposal from 1995. HTML 3.2 provides the foundation for on-going work by the ERB on further extensions.

Introduction of new versions have not made HTML 1.0 obsolete. Documents written in HTML 1.0 will still be supported by modern browsers. As a matter of fact, the most popular tags that are used in the present day documents are really HTML 1.0 tags.

There are many tools available in the market to create HTML documents without knowing the tags. These are knows as WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) Editors. You create the document just like you create any other document in a word processor and these editors embed the tags for you. (I created my site using Microsoft Frontpage, an excellent tool for all levels of webpage designers)