History of HTML

History helps us understand how it evolved.

  • WWW was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989
  • HTML was also invented by Tim Berners-Lee in late 1991, considered to be the first version of HTML
  • HTML 2.0 was published in 1995, considered to be the first standard HTML specification
  • HTML 3.2 was published in 1997, with some W3C recommendations
  • HTML 4.01 was published in late 1999, considered to be the major version that is widely used
  • XHTML 1.0 was published in 2000, which is the reformulation of HTML 4.01 in XML, which made XHTML case sensitive, and the XHTML documents are both Hypertext and XML documents
  • HTML 5 was published in 2012, which is an extension to HTML 4.01
  • HTML 5.1 was published in 2016, with some W3C recommendations
  • HTML 5.2 was published in 2017, with some more W3C recommendations

The latest version is referred to as HTML5, which is something we mean when we say HTML in this tutorial.

Overall

HTML is going to stay and every web developer must know about it.