History and Versions of HTML

Tim Berners-Lee is the person who defined HTML. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). He included the elements that could define title, paragraphs, hyperlink, headings, simple lists, address blocks and so on. But in that version of HTML there was no facility for producing tables or fill-in forms and images within a document.

In 1994, Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for producing standards for web technologies. W3C also defined the standards for HTML. As an outcome of W3C's efforts HTML 2.0 adopted web standard within it. The W3C released its HTML 4 recommendation in December 1997. The current version HTML4.01

which is now followed for producing web documents.

The meta language used to define the syntax for HTML 4.01 is SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language).

In 1998, the W3C introduced the EXtensible Markup Language (XML) which is a restricted version of SGML. Then a new version of HTML came up, which is called XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language). The syntaxes of XHTML are defined using XML, rather than SGML.