What is HTML? It’s a word often used and well-known by those who have interacted with the internet since its conception and subsequent mass public use, but it’s a word few people truly understand. At its most basic, the acronym stands for Hypertext Markup Language. It is the document file format which forms the basis of most every web page ever created and is the means by which you are able to read this blog post now.

HyperText is the means by which a person moves around the internet, ‘hyper’ simply denoting that the process is not linear with no set order, the user able to move all around the internet via hyperlinks. Markup indicates what HTML tags do to the text they encompass: mark it up as a type of text and treat it as such. Finally, HTML is a language, containing syntax like any other language.

27 years after its initial release and five iterations later (HTML is currently known by the name ‘HTML 5’), HTML stills remains the dominant markup language for web browsers. Developed by CERN employee Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, HTML 1.0 was released in 1993 “with the intention of sharing information which can be readable and accessible via web browsers” though the fact that very few of the developers were actively involved in the website creating also meant that the language did not grow . Each successive iteration has therefore attempted to make creating web pages easier, more efficient, and better able to lead to attractive results.

HTML uses tags to indicate to a browser how it should treat text. For example, the tag ‘b’ makes it so that these words will be bold, and these will not. Anything inside this ‘b’ type tag is thusly categorized. Text can more specifically be targeted and manipulated through the use of ‘attributes’ and the utilization of CSS (another language used to ‘style’ HTML documents, describing how the elements should be displayed). Indeed, the World Wide Web Consortium has, since 1997, encouraged only the use of CSS for explicit presentation over using HTML to do so (which is possible, though archaic and somewhat clunky).

This post should provide a very shallow history and understanding of HTML. The history of HTML and defining what it is are two things more difficult than actually learning HTML itself. Like any language, HTML follows rules and, once learnt, one can very easily and very quickly begin creating websites of one’s own. So, if you’re at all interested, search for the W3C website and follow the first few tutorials. You might find yourself quickly becoming adept at creating web pages and from there you can begin to learn about CSS and scripting languages, though those are topics for another blog post…