A Quick History of HTML
To understand the need for XML, you have to first consider the role of HTML. In the
early days of the Internet, some European physicists created HTML by simplifying
another markup language known as SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). I
won’t get into the details of SGML, but let’s just say it was overly complicated, at least
for the purpose of sharing scientific documents on the Internet. So, pioneering physicists
created a simplified version of SGML called HTML that could be used to create what we
now know as Web pages. The creation of HTML represents the birth of the World Wide
Web—a layer of visual documents that resides on the global network known as the Internet
HTML was great in its early days because it allowed scientists to share information over
the Internet in an efficient and relatively structured manner. It wasn’t until later that
HTML started to become an all-encompassing formatting and display language for Web
pages. It didn’t take long before Web browsers caught on and HTML started being used
to code more than scientific papers. HTML quickly went from a tidy little markup language
for researchers to a full-blown online publishing language. And once it was established
that HTML could be jazzed up simply by adding new tags, the creators of Web
browsers pretty much went crazy by adding lots of nifty features to the language.
Although these new features were neat at first, they compromised the simplicity of
HTML and introduced lots of inconsistencies when it came to how browsers rendered
Web pages. HTML had started to resemble a bad remodeling job on a house that really
should’ve been left alone.
As with most revolutions, the birth of the Web was very chaotic, and the modifications to
HTML reflected that chaos. More recently, a significant effort has been made to reel in
the inconsistencies of HTML and to attempt to restore some order to the language. The
problem with disorder in HTML is that it results in Web browsers having to guess at how
a page is to be displayed, which is not a good thing. Ideally, a Web page designer should
be able to define exactly how a page is to look and have it look the same regardless of
what kind of browser or operating system someone is using. This utopia is still off in the future somewhere, but XML is playing a significant role in leading us toward it.
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