HTML or "Hypertext Markup Language" is a word (or abbreviation) that we've all heard of somehow. A language that allows websites to appear in the browser.

In this article, we will try to briefly explain how or why HTML came into existence and how it came to the present day.

Tim Berners-Lee, while working at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) (European Center for Nuclear Research) in 1989, proposed a system in which scientists would share their working methods with others electronically. These documents should have an interface that would look the same on everyone's computer.

In fact, Tim had developed such a system for personal use in 1980 under the name Inquire (considered the first hypertext system).

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee developed the first Web browser, WorldWideWeb, on the NEXT computer (the computer developed by the NEXT company founded by Steve Jobs in 1985) to share his work at CERN with other people. created the world's first website. (When I say website, it only consists of a simple page. Click on the link to see it)

By 1991, Tim published 18 tags that make up HTML.

According to some sources, this date (October 29, 1991) is accepted as the release of HTML.

In 1992, sharing documents on the web became widespread. There were about 50 web servers running around the world. Along with this, discussion platforms on the Web began to be created. WWW-talk mailing list was one of them. Originally founded in the last months of 1991, it became popular in 1992 as a platform used by many academics and computer researchers for exchange of ideas and discussion. Dave Raggett was one of those who used this mailing list.

Dave visited Tim in 1992. They started working on HTML. Although HTML worked to a certain extent for sharing on the web, it still had many shortcomings. Together, they looked at all the examples in the print media (newspaper, magazine..etc) and made improvements to make HTML suitable for these types of texts. Finally, HTML version 1.0 was released in 1993.

The first version of HTML, 1.0, was very different from the HTML used today, much simpler and more restrictive (HTML 1.0 consisted of only 22 tags). Although the popularity of the Internet began to increase, very few people were still able to develop on the web (creating a site page from html).

In the same year, Marc Andreessen, working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), created a browser called Mosaic. A year later, Mosaic browser would be replaced by Netscape Navigator, which was created by the same person and known to many.

In 1994, Netscape Navigator was launched. This software was capable of fetching HTML pages from the internet and presenting the pages to users in graphical form. This web browser became one of the milestones of the World Wide Web. Netscape is used by over 90% of web users worldwide. The popularity of the Internet began to increase rapidly. Netscape's success has prompted other companies to take action. Microsoft has released its own web browser, Internet Explorer.

In 1995 the Web was gaining popularity and HTML 2.0 was released. HTML 2.0 was not much different from HTML 1.0 except for a few new features.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which took on the task of developing HTML in the same year, tried to create a standardization in HTML 3.0. However, it did not have much success as the discussion on what should be included did not go beyond the draft stage.

A consensus version, HTML 3.2, was released in January 1997. This added official features such as tables and text flowing around images while maintaining compatibility with previous versions. This version of HTML has become the official standard and all browsers have added the features that come with this version to their applications.

HTML Evolving

At the end of 1997, HTML 4.0 was recommended by the W3C. The new features in this version would cause a great evolution in HTML. Most of the new features introduced in previous versions of this version were a series of embellishments or patches on old labels. The biggest change was the separation of styling from html. It was now possible to perform styling operations outside of HTML and reference them here. Apart from that, with this version new tags were created for scripts, embedded objects, frames, more complex tables, more complex forms. HTML 4.0 became the official standard in 1998. After it was published, it was revised in some minor points and took its final version as 4.01.

XHTML 1.0

When we started to come to the 2000s, many websites started to be created with the spread of the internet. This situation led to the need for many new features. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released XHTML 1.0 specifications as a recommendation. X stands for Extensible and it is planned to be a version based on its compatibility with XML (Extensible Markup Language). XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4.01 were adopted as common standards.

HTML 5

With the penetration of the Internet into our lives, problems began to appear in the current versions, XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4.01. The existing versions were starting to fall short of people's desire to make more creative websites. In June 2004, a working group called WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group or Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) was established. WHATWG was a group made up of people from Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Developers. They started operating under the name Web Applications 1.0 in July 2004. After more than 3 years of work, the final version was sent to the W3C. In January 2008, W3C HTML5 was released as a working draft.

In the following years, the two largest mobile operating system manufacturers, Apple (iOS) and Google (Android), added HTML5 capabilities to their browsers.