History of Computers - HyperText Markup Language (HTML)
By Alec Winograd
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is an language used to make pages on the internet (History of Computers - The Internet). The coding determines the structure and layout of the page.
Overview
History
HTML was invented by Tim Berners-Lee with help from his coworkers at CERN, a scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. [1] Berners-Lee based HTML off of SGML (Standard Generalized Mark-up Language), and internationally accepted way for structuring pages and a code that could be used on any machine. HTML was shared publicly by Berners-Lee as he hoped others would add to HTML and make it better.[2]
HTML Basics
HTML uses tags usually enclosed by carrots (<,>). All HTML pages use the same basic skeleton (outline).
- <html>
- <head>
- <title>Document Name</title>
- </head>
- <body>
- Visible Text
- </body>
- </html>
For a full list of tags click here. For an HTML tutorial click here or here.
Significance
HTML is a huge part of the history of computers because it unified the world through the World Wide Web. It allows anybody to make a page and share information throughout the world. If you look at the page source of almost any page on the web (right click on the page and select view source), you will see that it begins with <html> and ends with </html>.
References
- ↑ http://inventors.about.com/od/computersoftware/a/html.htm
- ↑ http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html
