Question.2950 - Discuss the history of HTML. Who “invented” it? Why was it developed? What HTML tags are essential for an HTML page?
Answer Below:
HTML or HyperText Markup Language is the language used for the creation of documents on World Wide Web. It defines the basic structure and the layout of a webpage by means of tags such as <p> which refers to a paragraph or <H1> which refers to Heading level 1. This language was invented by Tim Berners-Lee (also the inventor of World Wide Web) to make easy use of cross referencing of a research paper and hence, help in the representation of the scientific and mathematical documentation on the web across the web. The first hypertext system had been developed by Tim in 1980 for his personal use only. Until that time only applications that allowed hypertext jumps of files on files and documents available in the same computer. http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html Hence, to make this language applicable on a global scene, Tim developing his own software and protocol called the HTTP, which was used to retrieve text from other documents with the use of the hypertext links. This HTML was based on the SGML (Standard Generalized Mark-up Language) which is globally accepted method of marking texts into structural units such as paragraphs, headings, list items and etc. The notion of using tags was also taken by Tim from SGML which with the use of the anchor element <A> as the basis of hypertext links made HTML very useful. All the required complex information regarding the document is available in these tags but are not visible on screen. Gradually after the release of the HTML by Tim a talk mailing list on www was initiated and this helped in the enhancing of the features of HTML through open chats and discussions by various researchers and computer and HTML enthusiasts around the world. Additions of new tags and features like the <IMG> for images and a better version named HTML+ was also introduced which later paved the path for the development of HTML 3. New tags also included- BGCOLOR attribute for the elements of BODY and FONT FACE, STYLE tag and CLASS attributes for style sheets. However, there are four tags that are quintessential for developing an HTML page viz. <html></html>, <head></head>, <title></title>, <body></body>. The <html> tag is the mail tag and defines the beginning and end of the page as well as the document as a web page. The <head> tag is the header tag which contains all the information relating to the title of document and the author of the document. The <title> tag defines the title of the document to appear on the title bar while the <body> tag consists of all the contents of the web page. http://www.simplehtmlguide.com/essential.phpMore Articles From Computer