The theory of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) began in the late 1960s. In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, invented the first successful implementation of HTML, which he called “HTML tags”. The first publicly available description of HTML was a document called “HTML Tags”, first mentioned on the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) website in December 1991. It was released in 1992 with an update to the “tags” list in 1993.
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the goal of standardizing HTML. W3C released its first recommendation, “HTML 2.0”, in 1995. HTML 3.2 was published as a W3C Recommendation in January 1997 and eventually became the basis for current web browsers’ support of HTML. In December 1999, W3C Recommendation “HTML 4.01” was published.
HTML5 is the latest evolution of the standard that defines HTML. The term represents two different concepts: It is a new version of the language HTML, with new elements, attributes, and behaviors, and a larger set of technologies that allows more diverse and powerful Web sites and applications. This set is sometimes called HTML5 & friends and often shortened to just HTML5.
HTML 5 is still under development but many modern browsers already support some of its features such as video playback and drag & drop. The current version is known as “Living Standard” and is updated on a regular basis by a group of dedicated editors working for both Mozilla Foundation and WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group).
