Hypertext Markup Language - HTML

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. HTML was proposed in a paper in 1989 by Dr. Berners-Lee, a physicist at CERN in Switzerland. It was derived as a subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), a computer language that had been created in 1986, but was little known. HTML was specifically designed to send electronic documents across a network. This language uses embedded tags that provide directions on how to display the contents of the document. HTML version 1.1 specifications were published in January 1992.

In the second half of the 1990s, many new technologies, such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Active Server Pages (ASP), were introduced and had a significant effect on the Internet. During this same time period, W3C continued to update HTML. The specifications for version 4.0 were released in December 1997 and were later revised in April 1998.

The following table of links provides more information about this latest version of HTML, HTML 4.0.