HTML - A Language for Web Pages

As you already know that we human beings need some type of a medium to start communicating with each other. So, with the evolution of mankind we have invented several means to convey our message. These include spoken, sign and braille languages.

Similarly, a website is written in a computer language that a Web Browser can understand. This language is named as “HTML” or Hyper Text Markup Language.

In simple words, a web browser is a software that reads your HTML source code; understands it; and then displays the output on computer screen. There are different companies that have created web browsers. Among them, most prominent are Google Chrome, Mozilla FireFox and Microsoft Edge.

Basic functionality of all these web browsers are same, the only difference exists when it comes to providing additional features and supporting latest HTML specifications.

Brief History of HTML

The idea of World Wide Web was started back in 1980, when an internet pioneer Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee aka Tim Berners-Lee created a prototype called “ENQUIRE” to connect and share information using the concept of hypertext.

After that in 1989, he proposed the idea of using his existing knowledge of “ENQUIRE” project to develop a system that can be used through the internet. To achieve his goal, he created the world’s first web browser and named it as WorldWideWeb.

The initial success of his project motivates him to design a completely new language that everyone can use for creating web pages. As a result, HTML was invented in 1991 to serve the purpose of structuring regular text, but it was only released as a draft.

Actual release of HTML started in 1995 as HTML 2. At this time, the idea of World Wide Web was interesting enough that big tech companies started investing their resources to accelerate its development.

This results in new versions of HTML appearing year after year. HTML 3.2 and HTML 4.0 were released in 1997. The latest version of this language is HTML5 which is created in 2014 to address the needs of modern website development.

Why Learn HTML5?

HTML5 is a compulsory language for people who wants to become a web designer or developer. You can create your own projects or even develop a website for others to earn money.

On a daily basis, there are hundreds of jobs posted on freelancing websites like Upwork, Fiverr and Freelancer.com which require the knowledge of HTML. You can use these websites to provide commercial web development services from home.

Basic Concepts

The architecture of HTML is created using the concept of Markup Language. Basically we use this language to mark regular text in a file to give it some meaning.

In HTML, we have a list of tags/elements that can be used to mark the opening and closing location of a text. For example: we can use the built-in tags to define links, headings, drop-down menu, images and paragraphs.

Most opening tags of HTML language accept additional “key-value” pairs to provide more information on how to process that specific tag. We call them as HTML Attributes.