Hypertext Markup Language

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a computer language used to create web pages. This was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, who was a physicist at the European particle physics laboratory known as CERN (Centre European pour la Recherche Nucleaire) in Geneva, Switzerland. The HTML that he invented was based on SGML (Standard Generalized Mark-up Language) that was already existing at that time.

Concise history of SGML, HTML and XML.

HTML is a language but it's not a programming language, it's a markup language. A markup language is a set of markup tags and HTML uses this markup tags to describe web pages. A web page or a HTML document consists of only text and special instructions called tags. Normally HTML tags come in pairs like <b> and </b>. Also some tags are unpaired. Most of the tags has an opening tag and a closing tag. They are also called as start tag and the end tag. Some tags have attributes to give options for the tag. The HTML tags are not displayed by the web browser but the tags are used to interpret the content of the page.

As advantages of HTML is that it is relatively easy to learn and it's easy to use. So that it is widely used and supported by most browsers. HTML is free and it dose not need any software. But it's language is static, the security is limited and sometimes it's hard to understand the structure of the HTML document are the disadvantages of the HTML.

Currently the HTML is outdated and now it is extended to XHTML. XHTML is the most current standard for creating web pages.

Timeline of Web Markup and Style Standards.

Bibliography
Dinusha, Dias Wickramasuriya. "Hypertext Markup Language," http://dinushawickramasuriya.blogspot.com, October 18, 2011.