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The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, Europe's high-energy physics
laboratory, which has long been involved in advanced computer technologies
supporting scientific research. In 1989,
Tim Berners-Lee
began developing the
Web at
CERN
to enable physicists around the globe to communicate more effectively
using hypertext.
Mosaic, the first graphical browser for the Web, was developed at
the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and
released to the public in February of 1993. Today the World Wide Web
connects information resources in more than 84 countries around the world.
HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language) was invented at CERN in
1990 and was included in the first WWW software release in August 1991.
There have been several versions of HTML. The original specification
is now known as HTML 0. Support for inline images and text highlighting
came in HTML 1. The most recently distributed standard, as of this
writing, is HTML 4.
HTML source documents are ASCII
text documents, containing text and embedded commands. The embedded commands
are called tags and are a kind of programming language for specifying
how documents are to be formatted and displayed. HTML tags can also be
used to create a method for users to interact with programs through a
Web server.
This document, like all web pages, is an HTML document. Although
more advanced tools are available for creating and modifying HTML, this
document, like many other web pages, was created with a simple text editor.
If you are viewing this with a Web Browser, you will not see the embedded
commands. Most browsers, however, do have a capability to display the
full text of an HTML document. If you are using Netscape, you can view
the full text of this document by selecting View from the toolbar at the
top of the Netscape window and then selecting "Page Source" from the
drop-down menu.
Simple HTML documents, like this one, serve as the foundation of every
web page on the World Wide Web. More complex pages are built by merging
other technologies into the framework that is created by the HTML document.
The HTML document serves as a framework or skeleton, upon which other
technologies such as Java Applets, and
JavaScript
are hung to create dynamic and interactive web pages.
Web Browsers are HTML interpreters. Your Browser interprets the embedded
commands for you and formats the text of the document accordingly.
If you would like to learn more about HTML, including all of the most
popular tags used in HTML documents, read
A Beginner's Guide to HTML.
If you're already an experienced HTML author, you might want to
bookmark our HTML Quick Reference Guide.
Other Resources for HTML Authors
- Our font table lists 228 of the most popular
fonts, and allows you to see what they look like on your browser.
- Our character table displays the ISO character
set for European languages and tells how to code characters that do not
appear on the keyboard.
- For beginning HTML authors, Adding Color to
HTML Documents explains how to control the color of text and
background in HTML documents.
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