HTML – The History of Hypertext Markup
Much of today’s Internet technology is based on the long-used, most debated language, HTML. It was designed to make the markup and layout of documents to be placed on web pages. The language began to acquire its first features in 1986. The impetus was the adoption of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ISO-8879-standard – Standard Generalized Markup Language or, in abbreviated form – SGML. It was accompanied by a description stating that SGML is intended for the structural markup of text. It is noteworthy that no description of the appearance of the document was intended.
From this, we can conclude that SGML was not a system for marking up text and did not have any list of language building blocks to be used in specific contexts. The language implied a description of the syntax for writing the main markup elements. After a while, they were given what is now well-known as “tags.” It was quite obvious that there was a need to create a language that:
– Described which element in which cases it is reasonable to apply;
– Contains a list of elements that can be used to create a document readable by various programs applicable in applications developer jobs.
While the SGML, like its sister applications, was not well developed, it was not completely abandoned. In 1991, the European Institute for Particle Physics announced the need to develop a mechanism to enable the transfer of hypertext information over the Global Web. It was the SGML that formed the basis of the future language – Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML).