HTML History

HTML was conceived of by Tim Berners Lee (Physicist by University Education) in 1989 whilst he was working at the computer services section of CERN (Conseil Europeéen pour la Recherche Nucleaire) in Geneva. The idea was to make it such that documents could be retrieved remotely but also link to each other, to form a web.

The first prototype for this idea was produced in 1990, but Tim had created his own personal hypertext system as early as 1980 (Enquire). Hypertext has been around for a long time, since the 1940s, but putting this system on the Internet was revolutionary. In 1991 the first website was built at CERN and the rest is HTML and web history.

Web adoption was fast, a lot of people cottoned onto the use of the web and how documents could relate to each other. So, in 2004 the W3C was founded by Tim Berners Lee at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). And in 1994 the HTML 2.0 specification was released.

The HTML 3.2 specification was released in May of 1996, and endured through the first web boom, and in April of 1998 the HTML 4.01 specification was released.

In the late 1990s XML was created. HTML was based on SGML which was proving to be an awkward language to describe HTML in. So, in December 1998 exploration began into using XML as the definition language for HTML (codename Voyager). In January of 1999 the XHTML 1.0 specification was borne, and by May of 2001 the XHTML 1.1 specification.

In 2004 Tim Berners Lee decided to return to the British Isles and work on what he describes as the semantic web, a mix of different technologies that will allow computer agents to better understand the web.