Where Did HTML Come From?
You most likely already know that HTML is used to build websites, but do you know where the language came from?
In 1989, a laboratory in CERN was one of the only places in the world that had access to the Internet. The Internet at that time was very different than the cat video utopia and the political dumpster fire that it is now. This Internet was a way for the scientists at CERN to access each other’s computers at will.
One of those scientists was Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Bernes-Lee felt the Internet had more significant potential then simply sharing text. He wanted to share — wait for it — files! Specifically, he wanted to be able to share academic papers with his colleagues easily.
Intending to create a way to share and receive more extensive collections of text data, Berners-Lee set out to and did create:
- Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
- Uniform Resource Identifier (URL)
- Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
Berners-Lee, with the help of his fellow scientists, launched the world’s first-ever web browser on Christmas day in 1990. Shortly after that, the first website was born, which was in true scientific fashion, a guide explaining how it all worked.
You can view that miracle of human ingenuity here: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
