A Brief History of HTML

HTML was created in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, as a way to link scientific documents together so people could jump between related papers by clicking. That original version had only about 18 tags.

Through the 1990s, HTML went through several versions as more browsers and companies got involved, each adding new tags for things like tables, forms, and images. This period was messy — different browsers supported different tags, and pages often looked different depending on which browser opened them.

HTML5, released in 2014, is the version this track teaches and the one every modern browser supports today. It added semantic tags (which describe meaning, not just appearance), native support for audio and video, and cleaned up a lot of the inconsistency from earlier versions.

Who created HTML, and why?

____, released in 2014, is the version of HTML every modern browser supports today.

The very first version of HTML in 1991 already had support for audio and video.