Overview of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
Tim Berners-Lee (1989) created the first adaptation of the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML). At present websites, still adopt many aspects of HTML to style text, links and graphics on a page. Tim Berners-Lee originally designed HTML to exchange readable documents for large government projects.
The foundations of HTML was actually first derived much earlier by Edward Mosher, Charles Goldfarb and Raymond Lorie (1960), called Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) a child of IBM's, Generalized Markup Language (GML).
It was later between 1978 and early 1980s, Bill Atkinson working as part of the Apple Macintosh development team, unknowingly set precedence in the future of HTML, with the creation of HyperCard (1987) (Source: Wikipedia.org HyperCard).
The concept behind HyperCard was the principle of ‘hyperlinking’. Surprisingly thought hyperlinking was not a new theory, before HyperCards release in the 1987, Nelson (1970) and Vannevar Bush (1945) using Memex, had already defined similar principles of linking, sadly the technology for graphical linking was not quite within reach until Bill Atkinson’s creation.
HyperCard’s technique of text and graphical linking along with SGML assisted greatly in the nuts and bolts HTML.
Another unforeseen result of HyperCard hyperlink system was the ability utilise it for programming method Rapid Application Development (RAD).
They have been several versions of HTML since its introduction in 1989, each more stringent in its syntax to promote better standards than the last. Presently the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is responsible for HTML specifications and standards (www.w3c.org).
Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML 1.0) (www.w3c.org) an application of SGML is often mistakenly assumed be to the latest version of HTML, but W3C’s state it’s a parallel language to version HTML version 4.01 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML)
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Last modified: 11/06/2008
