HTML

HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages. HTML constructs, images and other objects may be embedded into the rendered page. HTML elements are delineated by tags, written using angle brackets. Here is the HTML code for the classic "Hello, World!" Program

<!DOCTYPE html> This is a title Hello, World!

History
Development

In 1980, the physicist Tim Berners-Lee, a contractor at CERN, proposed and prototyped ENQUIRE, a system for CERN researchers to use and share documents. In 1989, Berners-Lee proposing an Internet-based hypertext system. Berners-Lee specified HTML and wrote the browser and server storage in late 1990. That year, Berners-Lee and CERN data systems engineer Robert Cailliau collaborated on a joint request for funding, but the project was not formally adopted by CERN. In his notes from 1990, he listed "some of the many areas in which hypertext is used" and put an encyclopedia first.

The first publicly available description of HTML was a document called "HTML Tags", first mentioned on the internet by Tim Berners-Lee in late 1991. It described 18 elements comprising the initial, relatively simple design of HTML. Except for the hyperlink tag, these were strongly influenced by SGMLguid, an in-house Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)-based documentation format at CERN. Eleven of these elements still exist in HTML 4.