HTML

Hypertext Markup Language

Html was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, who strongly based it on SGML¹ (Standard Generalized Mark-up Language), an internationally agreed upon method for marking up text into structural units. SGML could also be implemented on any machine, and at that time, this was an aspect that could not be underestimated. The idea was that the language had to be independent, so that it could have been displayed in the same way by all the browsers² (or other viewing softwares) that tried to display its content.

SGML's child

The use of pairs of tags³ such as <title> and </title>, which is still present in HTML, is taken directly from SGML, which does exactly the same. The SGML elements used in Tim's HTML included <p>, which stands for paragraph; <h1> through <h6> (heading level 1 through heading level 6); <ol> for ordered lists and <ul> for unordered lists; <li> for list items, and various others. What SGML does not include, and what the revolution inside HTML is, are hypertext links: the idea of linking pages with the <href> attribute and the “www.site.domain” format that we all know for addressing machines on the Web were both purely Tim’s inventions. The fact that HTML is based on SGML is actually a great thing, since every other language created from scratch might have been much less reliable, and less acceptable to the rest of the newborn world wide Internet community. Certainly, the simplicity and the universal reliability of HTML are what makes Tim's invention so useful.