The first public guide to HTML listed only eighteen tags
When Tim Berners-Lee first mentioned a document called HTML Tags online in late 1991, it described a mere 18 elements. Most were borrowed from an in-house documentation format used at CERN. Eleven of those original tags were still part of HTML years later, in version 4.
HTML is the standard language for documents shown in web browsers. It marks out structure such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links and quotations using tags written in angle brackets, and it can embed images, forms and scripts. Appearance and layout are mainly handled by CSS, which the World Wide Web Consortium has urged authors to prefer over presentational HTML since 1997.
Its story begins at CERN. In 1980, as a contractor there, the physicist Berners-Lee built ENQUIRE, a system for researchers to share documents. In 1989 he wrote a memo proposing a hypertext system running over the Internet, and in late 1990 he specified HTML and wrote both the browser and the server. He and the CERN engineer Robert Cailliau sought funding that year, but CERN never formally adopted the project. Among the uses for hypertext he jotted down in 1990, the first was an encyclopedia. Many of HTML's text elements echo formatting languages going back to the RUNOFF command written for the CTSS time-sharing system in the early 1960s.
Berners-Lee regarded HTML as an application of SGML, and a first formal draft with Dan Connolly appeared in mid-1993; it notably acknowledged the Mosaic browser's own tag for inline images. Dave Raggett proposed a rival, HTML+. HTML 2.0, completed in 1995, was the first version meant as a true standard. From 1996 the W3C took charge. HTML 3.2 adopted most of Netscape's visual tags but, by agreement between the two rivals, left out Netscape's blink and Microsoft's marquee elements. HTML 4.0 began pushing visual markup aside in favour of style sheets.
After HTML 4.01 in late 1999, the W3C's attention turned to the XML-based XHTML, and HTML itself stalled for years. Work on HTML5 began in 2004 in a separate group, WHATWG, became a joint project with the W3C in 2008 and was standardised on 28 October 2014.
Source: HTML
