History of HTML

 History of HTML 

Hello everyone In this article we are discuss a little bit of history that useful for basic interviews etc. This article is taken from the book of “Web programming Building internet application second edition by Chris Bates”. I hope this article is useful for all the reader. This article gives the basic idea of forming a markup language and upgrading itself. This article has just basic information of the things about markup languages and user-friendly front end designs and also styling etc. 

The idea of hypertext and hyperlinked documents has been around for a while. In order to be practical it required the implementation of a number of technologies which began to come together in the 1980s, an early example being the HyperCard information management system from apple. HTML itself was developed by Tim Berners-Lee when he worked at CERN the European center for particle physics. The phenomenal success of HTML as a format was due to the Mosaic browser developed by NCSA the US super-computing center, and the simplicity of language itself. 

Tim Berners-Lee
The founder of HTML 

Mosaic was the result of a US government funded research project and was distributed free of charge. Much of the functionality that we now see in the Netscape Navigator browser in particular has evolved directly from the early Mosaic browser so that although Mosaic itself is no longer in development, its influence lives on. 

HTML is an application of something called SGML, the Standardized General Markup Language. SGML grew from a number of pieces of work, notably Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher and Raymond Lorie at IBM who created a General Markup Language in the late 1960s. In 1978 The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) set up a committee to investigate text processing languages. Charles Goldfarb joined that committee and lead a project to extend GML. In 1980 the first draft of SGML was released and after a series of reviews and revisions became a standard in 1985.

The use of SGML was given impetus by US Department of Defense (DoD). By the early 1970s DoD was already being swamped by electronic documentation. Their problem arose not from the volume of data, but from the variety of mutually incompatible data formats. SGML was a suitable solution for their problem and for many others over the years. 

Many people mistakenly believe that the Internet and World Wide Web are the same thing. In fact the Internet has been growing for a long time and supports a number of TCP/IP based protocols. Standards exist for sending e-mail (SMTP), Usenet news (NNTP), and file transfer (FTP), alongside a variety of indexing and searching mechanisms such computing and the Internet, based in large part upon the growth of homepages on the Web. These homepages are attractive to authors and readers because they are written in HTML and can be formatted in a wide variety of appealing ways. 

To be successful the Web depends on Web page authors and browser vendors sharing the same conventions for HTML. Commercial vendors such as Netscape (e.g. frames) and Microsoft (e.g. banners) have attempted to develop proprietary tags so that certain text formatting can only be seen on their browser. Such developments are both unwelcome and unlikely to succeed against the libertarian and anarchic framework of the Web. Where a development is seen to be both popular and widely useful, such as Netscape’s frame tag or some of Microsoft’s Dynamic HTML developments, it will be accepted into a revision of the HTML standard. Where tags are either too system specific or lack technical merit they tend to fall into disuse. There is little point developing a Web site using fancy formats which visitors cannot see with their browser. 

HTML standards are created by a group of interested organizations and individuals called W3C. there have now been three official HTML standards: version 2.0 was released in 1994 and remains the baseline for backwards compatibility and should be supported by all browsers and authoring tools; version 3.2 was released in 1996 with many additions; version 4.0 was ratified towards the end of 1997 slightly amended in late 1999. Although many books have been published based around the HTML 3.0 specifications this version was never officially released by W3C. When you create your new documents try to stick to using HTML 4.0- all of the major browsers will soon support it and relatively few Web surfers use the older versions of the browsers. 

HTML has been developed so that a wide variety of client systems should be able to use information from the Web: PCs and workstations with graphics displays of varying resolutions and colors depths; cellular telephones; handheld devices; devices for speech for output and input; computers with high or low bandwidth; and cable-television systems. Authors, especially those developing commercial Web sites need to be aware of all these. Excluding anyone from using a site means excluding customers – fancy Web pages are very nice but surely counter-productive if they lead to a smaller growth in the customer base than might have been expected. Having said that, there’s no excuse for ignoring the standards. If authors had not implemented the new tags as they were ratified by W3C we wouldn’t have tables and forms, or stylesheets, or a myriad of other useful formats. The whole Web surfing experience would surely be poorer for these omissions.

Note: 

The HTML 4.0 specification document from W3C says: 

HTML documents should work well across different browsers and platforms. Achieving interoperability lowers costs to content providers since they must develop only one version of a document. If the effort is not made, there is much greater risk that the Web will devolve into a proprietary world of incompatible formats, which will ultimately reduce the Web’s commercial potential for all participants. 

Is this article helpful to you? And do you have any doubts.. let me know in the comment section