HTML and the World Wide Web

HTML: The Building Blocks of the Web

Just about everything a person views on the World Wide Web is constructed using a series of code called HTML. HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, is at its core a way to represent hypertext content in a readable fashion for users. Developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in the early 1990s, it was intended to “[enable] researchers from remote sites in the world to organize and pool together information.” It was developed in conjunction with the World Wide Web itself to aid in research, but that project would grow to form an infrastructure upon which most every person on the planet engages with every day.

HTML functions via a series of tags that are then read by a computer program. These tags are denoted by the use of angle brackets (“<” and “>”) which enclose the specific media that is being marked up. For example, text found within a “<title>” tag would be marked as the title for the page being displayed, and all the text following the tag until its end (marked by a corresponding “</title>” tag) would be affected by the tag. These styles of tags were not Berners-Lee’s own invention, however; much of the design of HTML was taken from another markup language, Standard Generalized Markup Language, or SGML. Specifically, the paired tag system using angle brackets was lifted from SGML, as well as some of SGML’s own tags like <title> and <p> (paragraph). HTML, however, provided its own expansion upon SGML, as Berners-Lee himself notes, by allowing the navigation of hypertext documents while also being easier to use than SGML, making it an easy to use language that would also make navigating the Web consistently simple to navigate for any user.