-
SGMLuid
-
AQUIRE
-
ENQUIRE
-
ATD
EXPLANATION
In 1980, physicist
Tim Berners-Lee, a contractor at
CERN, proposed and prototyped
ENQUIRE, a system for CERN researchers to use and share documents. In 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a memo proposing an
Internet-based
hypertext system.
[3]
Berners-Lee specified HTML and wrote the browser and server software in
late 1990. That year, Berners-Lee and CERN data systems engineer
Robert Cailliau collaborated on a joint request for funding, but the project was not formally adopted by CERN. In his personal notes
[4] from 1990 he listed
[5] "some of the many areas in which hypertext is used" and put an encyclopedia first.
The first publicly available description of HTML was a document called
"HTML Tags", first mentioned on the Internet by Tim Berners-Lee in late 1991.
[6][7]
It describes 18 elements comprising the initial, relatively simple
design of HTML. Except for the hyperlink tag, these were strongly
influenced by
SGMLguid, an in-house
Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)-based documentation format at CERN. Eleven of these elements still exist in HTML 4.
[8]
HTML is a
markup language that
web browsers use to interpret and
compose
text, images, and other material into visual or audible web pages.
Default characteristics for every item of HTML markup are defined in the
browser, and these characteristics can be altered or enhanced by the
web page designer's additional use of
CSS. Many of the text elements are found in the 1988 ISO technical report TR 9537
Techniques for using SGML, which in turn covers the features of early text formatting languages such as that used by the
RUNOFF command developed in the early 1960s for the
CTSS
(Compatible Time-Sharing System) operating system: these formatting
commands were derived from the commands used by typesetters to manually
format documents. However, the SGML concept of generalized markup is
based on elements (nested annotated ranges with attributes) rather than
merely print effects, with also the separation of structure and markup;
HTML has been progressively moved in this direction with CSS.
Berners-Lee considered HTML to be an application of SGML. It was formally defined as such by the
Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF) with the mid-1993 publication of the first proposal for an HTML
specification, the "Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)" Internet Draft by
Berners-Lee and
Dan Connolly, which included an SGML
Document type definition to define the grammar.
[9][10] The draft expired after six months, but was notable for its acknowledgment of the
NCSA Mosaic
browser's custom tag for embedding in-line images, reflecting the
IETF's philosophy of basing standards on successful prototypes.
Similarly,
Dave Raggett's
competing Internet-Draft, "HTML+ (Hypertext Markup Format)", from late
1993, suggested standardizing already-implemented features like tables
and fill-out forms.
[11]
After the HTML and HTML+ drafts expired in early 1994, the IETF
created an HTML Working Group, which in 1995 completed "HTML 2.0", the
first HTML specification intended to be treated as a standard against
which future implementations should be based.
[12]
Further development under the auspices of the IETF was stalled by competing interests. Since 1996, the HTML specifications have been maintained, with input from commercial software vendors, by the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
[13] However, in 2000, HTML also became an international standard (
ISO/
IEC
15445:2000). HTML 4.01 was published in late 1999, with further errata
published through 2001. In 2004, development began on HTML5 in the
Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), which became a joint deliverable with the W3C in 2008, and completed and standardized on 28 October 2014.
[14]
