Who is the primary author of HTML? Everything you need to know

July 31, 2022

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The primary author of HTML is Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist, and academic who came up with the idea for HTML while working at CERN and invented the world wide web in 1989.

CERN is an international scientific institution based in Geneva, Switzerland

What is HTML and who is the primary author of HTML?

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, designed to represent a document into a meaningful webpage that can share across the internet.

The HTML document has a set of building blocks of tags, semantics, and properties in a nested tag hierarchy structure that renders the web page’s in the browser.

It also defines the syntax for the document head that describes the page’s meta information and the body containing the document’s content.

This blog details the invention of HTML. In addition, the period of its creation and the details about the primary author.

The world’s first HTML webpage: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

Who was the primary author of HTML

The primary author is Tim Berners-Lee. He developed version 1.0 in 1993, and this became the first version of HTML.

Many improved tags were released in this version. version 4.01 was the most widely used version in the 2000s and this version was the official standard in December 1999. Another version, XHTML, was a rewrite as an XML application.

Why did the primary author create HTML?

The primary author Tim Berners-Lee created HTML to structure and present content that all web browsers understand,

Hypertext refers to how elements like text, images, and media are linked together to make a web page.

The markup language is a type of programming language that is used to annotate the text. For example, HTML comprises a series of elements that define the structure and content.

A web browser then renders these elements to display the webpage document. In the modern web, almost all the webpages are structured with HTML and have revolutionized the internet.

It is intended to become standardized by browsers that can display text and images on Web pages. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a group of people and organizations responsible for developing web standards.

The internet was not the same as before. HTML is the first thing that the internet needs to be more helpful. Without this, the internet would have been like a ghost town.

The internet would have been a lot less popular, and it would have been harder to use in the 90s.

The internet is one of people’s most essential tools for sharing information. However, without HTML, the internet would still be behind in terms of how it looks.

HTML version history timeline

HTML has evolved over the years and currently has multiple versions. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed and maintained HTML.

The language is now up to version HTML5, which came out in 2015. Many versions of the language have been released, and each version has allowed its user to create web pages in a much easier and prettier way and make sites very efficient.

v1.0

This version was released in 1993 by the primary author, and this was a basic version intended to share information through web browsers. However, at the time, few people were interested in creating a website, and features were also limited.
The basic version has limited webpage design elements, like text and image tags, and this version does not support forms, tables, fonts, etc. It does not have many rich elements to organize and style the web page to be rendered on the browser.
Also, we need to know the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) didn’t exist at the time.

v2.0

HTML version 2.0 was developed in 1995 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to improve the functionality of version 1.0. and got standards to maintain rules and regulations to follow on different browsers to render tags with similar functionality. And this version was a standard until Jan 1997, with many core HTML features introduced.
version 2.0 is the first significant revision of the HTML standard and introduces many new and improved markup tag elements. This revision is based on the SGML standard. In addition, version 2.0 introduced the Document Object Model (DOM), a client-side model for accessing and manipulating documents.
This version introduces the Form tags to get input from the user on the web page, but it still has basic input tags like text boxes, buttons, etc., and the Table tag was introduced in this version.

v3.0

The previous standards offered some decent abilities to web developers. Still, they thirsted for more abilities and tags. They wanted to enhance the look of their websites.
version 3.0 was the next step in the evolution of the HTML game, offering some of the most powerful features on the web. version 3.0 became the next generation of the HTML standard.
Netscape Navigator leads the browser market at the time. They introduce new tags and attributes into their browser called Netscape Extension tags. These tags came with significant problems for other browsers to display these tags in the same way.
At this time, Dave Raggett, the leader of the HTML working group, released the new draft of version 3.0 with improved features, giving the more powerful abilities to design the webpage. Still, the browsers were slow to implement these tags, and left some of this could cause the failure of the version 3.0 specification.

v3.2

The specification needs to be standardized to be implemented in the browsers, so the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in 1994.
Then version 3.2 came in. This version was developed in 1997 and introduced its standards. Today, all browsers fully support this standard.
This version came with the support of CSS(Cascading Style Sheet) to style webpages. This CSS helps the webpage looks better to render in browsers.
The frame tag is introduced in this version.

v4.01

This version was developed in 1999 and came with extensive evolution. Early its code name was COUGAR and supported internationalization and many new supports for CSS (cascading style sheets).
In the previous version, we needed to write the CSS for each page, and this caused code duplication on each page. The solution for this issue is released in version 4.01. It had a concept called an external style sheet, and the style can be written in CSS files and included on HTML pages.
This version also came with many new tags to improve the browsing experience. You can read more about the new tags released in this version at this link https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/.

v5

This version was released on 22 January 2008. It is the latest version right now, and this version came with a lot of modern changes to support developers in building modern web applications,
W3C introduced many new HTML tags, and Form input got new types, of audio-video tags to support media on the web page.
SVG vector graphics support has been introduced, which has an enormous impact on adobe flash.
Semantic HTML tags were released to support SEO and to make meaningful tags like Header, Footer, Article, Aside, Section, Figure, Nav, and Progress tags, and many new tags are introduced.