2.1 HTML Origin

The best way to start learning HTML is by learning basics. It’s not really all that complicated, and once you know basics, it will be easy to learn the more advanced stuff that comes in the coming chapters.

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) had its origin back in the early days of the Internet. The Internet was already being used, primarily by research scientists, to exchange research, manuscripts and data. Many people realized that this new electric communication medium had great potential. What was needed was a standard way of creating documents so they would be accessible and viewable over the Internet. Central to this was the idea of a hyperlink, a way of linking related documents together so the user could easily move from one document to the other. At this time, Tim Berners-Lee was a researcher at a lab in Europe. He took on this challenge and soon came up with a simple markup language that met the most important requirements:

1. A means to link documents together, no matter where on the Internet they were located.
2. A way to add simple formatting to a document, such as paragraphs, bold and italicized text and headings.
3. A method for displaying images in the document.

With some help from others, Tim developed the first version of HTML. It was a lot simpler that what we use today, but all the basic pieces were in place. Tim did not try to patent his invention but put it in the public domain where it was and still is freely available for anyone to use. Its use spread rapidly and, hence, the World Wide Web was born. It may be hard to believe, but the first version of HTML came out in the early 1990s, barely more than a decade ago. This does not seem like nearly enough time for the Web to have grown to its current size and importance, but that’s what happened.

The rendering of an HTML document is what the user sees in their browser. It is formatted content only (no HTML tags and seen). The HTML source code is what’s actually in the documents. It’s what you’ll be working on as you create and edit Web pages. Browsers offer a way to view the source code for the current HTML document. In Internet Explorer it is View>Source; in Mozilla Firefox, it is View>Page Source. Viewing the source is a great way to understand the HTML behind good and not-so-good Web pages.