Building Blocks of the Web: HTML
What is HTML, and Why HTML is so important?
Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989. Director of World Wide Web Consoritum overseeing HTML Standards
HTML Has become the standard language used to produce web pages and Applications. Although HTML was created before the introduction of the world wide web, it has largely had its implementation built on top of it. The world wide web was introduced by Tim Berners-Lee (as above). Tim used this initial idea to allow physicists to collaborate and share work seamlessly. Use of HTML can display content in an organised fashion
HTML 1.0
As HTML 1.0 was the first version of its kind, there were only few functional features. As there wasnt much 'website creation' done in this period of time, the language was very limiting. There were up to 20 styling elements to display information on the screen
This version supported inline images and text controls, for displaying paragraphs, headings and titles, with their accompanying image.
This is a heading
This is a paragraph. This is often used to convey basic information on the web-page, in an era where the web wasnt mainstream
This is a HTML 1.0 Example, with some of its only features
HTML 2.0
Created in 1995, This is a drastic improvement to its barebones predesessor HTML 1.0. HTML 2.0 had become the first official standard for HTML, measured by all major browsers to follow. At Around this time, the world wide web W3C was created (as mentioned)
This version supports: changing of page background, text colour, text face, forms, while also including tables and text boxes:
HTML 2.0 Example
HTML Tables
| Firstname | Lastname | Age |
|---|---|---|
| Jill | Smith | 50 |
| Eve | Jackson | 94 |
| John | Doe | 80 |
HTML 2.0 had basic support for tables and forms, but its ability was very limited. It could not (input) and submit to external sites
HTML 3.0 and 3.2
By this version of HTML was released, this technology was recieving a mass audience. After some time, developers wanted more control and customizability of their sites, and had demanded more tags/features.
at the time of release of version 3.0 at HTML group, led by a man called Dave Ragget There were mamy new and improved design functionalities. But due to such an overhaul in new features, browsers couldn't keep up and ended up running quite slow. Some features were: fill out forms, tables and mathematical equations
With the unadventful failure to run html 3.0 at a reasonable speed failed, there was a push to develop html as a standard. With the help of the World Web Consortium (W3C) many tags introduced by other organisations such as Netscape and Microsoft were scrapped, making way for HTML 3.2 to be the official standard in January '97. Today all browsers support it fully. HTML 3.2 provides full backwards compatibility with HTML 2.0
a new 'applet' element was introduced in 3.2. Included in the DTD were "placeholder" elements such as 'script' and 'style' which would facilitate the transition to the next version of HTML
An Example of a Webpage in HTML3.0
This text contains superscript text.
This text contains subscript text.
HTML Fillable Forms
HTML 4.0
Version 4 was a large evolution of the HTML standards. Most of the functionality recieved from this version was defined in the 3.0 spec, which includes external scripts and support for Cascading Stylesheets CSS (discussed further). It became the official standard in April 1998, and support for it was adopted extremely quickly.
HTML 5.0
HTML 5 is the current version of HTML which is used. “We’ve come a long way since HTML could barely handle a simple page layout. HTML5 can be used to write web applications that still work when you’re not connected to the net; to tell websites where you are physically located; to handle high definition video; and to deliver extraordinary graphics.” (Marshall, 2017). HTML 5 continues to evolve and is supported by all of the biggest browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera and Edge. HTML has come very far since the first version (HTML 1.0), which only offered simple features meaning most webpages looked very similar. Since then the W3 Consortium has been established, css has been created, more features are supported by browsers and in general, more can be done with HTML. This means there’s less confusion, universal standards and ease of use. HTML is constantly progressing and changing — in a few decades, we can expect that HTML will have advanced even further.
Now HTML5 Supports more tags related to multimedia such as: < audio > < video > and structural elements such as headers, navigation menus and main content sections. In fact this website you are using is based on HTML5+TAGS: header,nav,main,article,footer
HTML 5 Features
As HTML 5 Allows better seperation of content into different groups (eg footers, headers, main and navigation bars) there is more place for content on the screen such as videos, audio, multimedia etc.