History of HTML Essay

HTML or HyperText Markup Language is the predominant and most currently most popular language for creating web pages. It is a well-designed language to describe the structure of text-based information in a document by using certain tags referred to as HTML tags and using certain text links, heads, paragraphs, tables, lists and headings. While HTML is written in the form of tags, surrounded by angle brackets. HTML can also describe, to some degree, the appearance and semantics of a document, and can include embedded forms, and other scripting language codes, which can affect the behavior of Web browsers and other HTML processors. It is assumed that what made this language a very popular web development language is its English-like characteristic which makes it relatively easy to comprehend, and memorize the tags as compared to most other languages. It was in the late 1980’s, when the physicist Tim Berners-Lee, who was an independent contractor at CERN, proposed and prototyped ENQUIRE, a system for CERN researchers to use and share documents. In 1989, Berners-Lee and CERN Robert Cailliau, a data systems engineer from CERN, each submitted separate proposals for an Internet-based hypertext system providing similar functionality. The following year, they collaborated on a joint proposal, the Worldwide Web (W3) project; this proposal was accepted by CERN and as of now, and the project continued to grow from the day that it was developed, and continuous to grow up until present. In the advent of the interne and in the continuous increase in its popularity, came parallel the advent of the web-development language HTML. Although it has already been an accepted and established concept in the field of academics as early as the 1940s. It was with the advent of he personal computer that hypertext came into popularity. Bill Atkinson came up with the astounding idea in the late 1980s. It was then the he and his team developed Hypercard, an application for the Macintosh Operating System. Hypercard allows users to construct a series of on-screen `filing cards’ that would be able to contain text and graphics. Users can also navigate through these filing cards by pressing on-screen buttons, which were designed for simple and plain navigation. Hypercard easily became popular and was integrated on many other applications. Toolbox, for Personal Computers was developed and popularized in the 1990s for hypertext training courses. These courses came up with a more advanced navigation system wherein viewers or users were able to view pages with buttons which can help them navigate forward or backward or jump to a topic. Hypercard and its co-programs easily became popularized, however they were still held back by certain limitations. The major limitation was that hypertext jumps were only allowed to be made to files on the same computer. Hypertext umps to computers on other countries or on the other side of the world were still not possible. Hypertext communication was still on the local scale and not available in the global scale. It the increasing demands for global scale hypertext communication that the HTML came into advent. HTML has had a development-span of roughly seven years. During that time, it has evolved from a simple language with a small number of tags to a complex system of mark-up tags, enabling authors to create visually stunning web pages complete with sound and animation. Basically, the language developed from HTML+, HTML 2, HTML 3. 2, HTML 4. And finally HTML 5, which was released in 2008. A document called â€Å"HTML Tags†, was the first publicly available description of the HTML. This was known to public by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. It describes 22 elements comprising the initial, relatively simple design of HTML, thirteen of these elements still exist up to HTML 4. At that time, Berners-Lee considered HTML to be an application of Standard Generalized Markup Language or SGML. However, it was not formally announced until the mid-1993 publication, by the IETF, of the first proposal for an HTML specification. Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly’s made an internet draft, â€Å"Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)†. This included an SGML document type definition to define the grammar. The HTML and HTML+ drafts expires in 1994, and that was when IETF created an HTML Working Group, which in 1995 completed â€Å"HTML 2. 0†, the first HTML specification intended to be treated as a standard against which future implementations should be based. HTML 2. 0 included ideas from the HTML and HTML+ drafts. HTML 2. 0 became the standard for website design until the year 1997. By then, more people were using HTML, and while the previous standards offered some decent abilities, people thirsted for more abilities and tags as to be able to better enhance the appearance of their websites. At this time, a HTML working group, led by Dave Raggett introduced HTML 3. 0. It included many new and improved abilities for HTML, and promised far more powerful opportunities to HTML users. HTML 4. 0 was recommended by W3C in 1997 and became the official standard in April 1998. Browser support was undertaken surprisingly earnestly by Microsoft in their Internet Explorer browser HTML 4. 0 was a large evolution of the HTML standards, and the last version of the classic HTML. At present, the newest version of the HTML is HTML 5. 0. It was published as a working draft by W3C last January 22, 2008, and includes major revisions in the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. In this version, new features, elements and functionalities had been introduced to aid web developers to further improve the appearance and back-end structure of websites.