HTML

In the late 1980s, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), located in Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border, brought together thousands of physicists from hundreds of institutes worldwide, generating unprecedented volumes of data and requiring sophisticated information-sharing systems. Tim Berners-Lee, a British engineer, joined CERN in 1984. Confronted with the laboratory's computational fragmentation, he proposed in March 1989 a project for a distributed information network founded on hypertext documents — texts containing clickable cross-references linking fragments of information across the network. From 1990 onwards, Berners-Lee formalised his concept by creating three complementary technologies. First, the HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), a simple stateless application protocol designed to transmit hypertext documents over existing TCP/IP networks. Second, HTML (HyperText Markup Language), based on the 1974 SGML standard, which uses tags in angle brackets to annotate portions of text and allow browsers to uniformly interpret the logical structure of a document. Third, the URL (Uniform Resource Locator), a standardised syntax for identifying and locating network resources. These three components together constitute the World Wide Web. The first Web server ran on a NeXT computer from December 1990. On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee publicly announced the World Wide Web on Usenet's alt.hypertext discussion group, making the server and client code available under an open licence. He drafted the first HTML specification in November 1991 — version 1.0 — containing about twenty tags. From 1993 onwards, Marc Andreessen and his team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois developed Mosaic, the first mainstream graphical browser, which spectacularly democratised public access to the Web. HTML evolved rapidly: HTML 2.0 in 1995, HTML 3.2 in 1997, HTML 4.0 in 1998 and HTML5 in 2014. From 1991 to today, HTML established itself as the universal standard for structuring and exchanging documents over the Internet. Billions of web pages, business applications, cloud architectures and immersive experiences rely on HTML and associated technologies. The language remains the only universal standard understood by all browsers, all search engines and all connected devices, making possible Google, Wikipedia, e-commerce and the entire contemporary digital civilisation.