Introduction

HTML is developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1992. He felt that there was a possibility of linking documents together by the use of hypertext and the concept of HTML evolved. The drawback was that the commercial hypertext packages available at that time such as ZOG and Intermedia were customized to suit different types of computers and were too ambiguous in nature.

He developed HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and in conjunction, developed a protocol for accessing text from other documents via hyperlinks. The protocol was called HTTP, and this paved the way for the future. HTML itself was derived from a markup language called SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language).

HTML Released

The various versions of HTML that have been released are as follows:

• HTML 2.0 (November 1995)
• HTML 3.2 (January 1997)
• HTML 4.0 (December 1997)
• HTML 4.01 (December 1999)

A breakthrough in the field was the introduction of CSS along with HTML 4.0. Prior to the introduction of CSS, web designers and developers used HTML for formatting purposes. Formatting and styling a web page using HTML defeats the purpose of HTML, as HTML elements and attributes must only define the structure of the web page. The purpose of CSS was to break styling out from structural markup. With the introduction of CSS, we could separate presentation from content.

As a result, formatting could be separated from the HTML document and stored in a separate file, which could then be included in the document using a link tag. Hence, all the presentational HTML elements and attributes were replaced by CSS to provide versatility and better accessibility. Now, we can define a look or modify the look of a web page by making changes in the style sheet without actually altering the code.

As far as HTML is concerned, the latest version, which is HTML5, is still in the development stage. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are working together on HTML5. The proposed year for the release is around 2018