# Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) The standard markup language used to create and structure the content of web pages and web applications. **Pronunciation:** hahy-per-tekst mahrk-uhp lang-gwij **Difficulty:** Beginner **Synonyms:** HTML **Categories:** Web Development, Markup Languages **Tags:** HTML, Web, Frontend, Markup, W3C, Standard Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/glossaries/hypertext-markup-language --- ## Definitions - **Standard for Web Page Creation:** **Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)** is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It forms the very core structure, or the 'skeleton', of a webpage. ### Key Concepts: * **Elements**: The building blocks of HTML pages. They are represented by tags. * **Tags**: Used to mark up the start and end of an element. For example, `

` is a start tag for a paragraph, and `

` is the end tag. * **Attributes**: Provide additional information about elements. They are always specified in the start tag and usually come in name/value pairs like `name="value"`. For example, in ``, `href` is an attribute. ### Usage: HTML is not a programming language; it's a markup language. It works in conjunction with two other core technologies: * **Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)**: To describe the presentation and styling (colors, fonts, layout). * **JavaScript (JS)**: To control the behavior and add interactivity to web pages. ### Example: A simple HTML document structure: ```html Page Title

My First Heading

My first paragraph.

This is a link to the W3C ``` In this example, `

`, `

`, and `` are all elements that structure the content within the `` of the page. ## Etymology The term is a composite of 'Hypertext' and 'Markup Language'. 'Hypertext' refers to text that contains links (hyperlinks) to other texts, a concept envisioned by Ted Nelson in 1965. 'Markup Language' refers to a system for annotating a document to define its structure and presentation, distinguishing it from the actual content. ## First used 1993 ## Historical context The origins of **HTML** are tied to the birth of the World Wide Web. In the late 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist at the CERN research institute in Switzerland, envisioned a system for scientists to share documents and data across a network. * **1991**: Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web, and with it, the first version of HTML, which was a simple, text-based language with 18 tags. * **1993**: The first formal proposal for HTML is published by Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly. * **1995**: HTML 2.0 is published as the first official standard, aiming to standardize the features of various web browsers that had emerged. * **1997**: HTML 3.2 is released by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which was formed to maintain web standards. It introduced widely used features like tables and applets. * **Late 1990s (The 'Browser Wars')**: Netscape and Microsoft competed for browser dominance, implementing their own proprietary HTML tags, leading to compatibility issues. * **1999**: HTML 4.01 becomes a W3C recommendation, promoting the separation of content (HTML) from presentation (CSS). * **2000**: The W3C releases XHTML 1.0, a stricter, XML-based version of HTML. For several years, it was considered the future of web markup. * **2004**: A group of individuals from Apple, Mozilla, and Opera formed the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) to work on a new standard, HTML5, focusing on web applications and a more pragmatic approach than XHTML. * **2014**: The W3C officially releases the HTML5 recommendation, which introduced major new features like `

`, `
`, and `