HTML History

There have been several editions of HTML released, both in the draft form and official releases. Tim Berners-Lee first invisioned HTML in 1980 as a system for CERN to share documents. His prototype was called ENQUIRE. The first publically available draft of the HTML specification was called HTML Tags and was available in 1991.

Since 1991, HTML has gone through many changes. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) first formally defined HTML as a draft in 1993. This draft was updated later in 1993 with HTML +. Finally in November of 1995 HTML 2.0 was released as the first official specification of HTML. HTML 2.0 was updated for forms, tables, image maps and internationalization. HTML 2.0 stopped being supported as of June 2000.

In April 1995 HTML 3.0 was first announced. The IETF let this standard expire without further expansion. The complexity of this standard along with the browser developers warring for supremacy caused the standard to be split. Both Netscape and Internet Explorer went their own direction, implementing different tags and extending the standards in their own ways.

Finally the World Wide Web Consortium recommended HTML 3.2 in January 1997. Since then the W3C has kept the standard. HTML 4.0 was published in December 1997 with edits in April of 1998. At the release of HTML 4.0 three subsets, or flavors, of HTML were included in the standards. Strict did not allow the use of any deprecated tags, transitional allowed the use of older tags, to make the transition to HTML 4.0 easier and frameset could be used to allow multiple frames in HTML. HTML 4.01 was released in December 1999 with updates until the most resent release in May 2001.

The first draft of HTML 5.0 was not released until January 2008. This version of HTML abandons any reference to its SGML roots. This version is under development by several organizations but a release date has not yet been set.

In January of 2000, XHTML 1.0 was published. XHTML is a separate language from HTML that takes the HTML 4.01 tags and uses the more strict formatting of XML 1.0. In May 2001 XHTML 1.1 was released which is an update to XHTML 1.0. XHTML 2.0 is in draft and is set to be abandoned by the end of 2009 with no standard. XHTML 5.0 is being developed along side HTML 5.0. Like XHTML 1.0 is to HTML 4.01, XHTML 5.0 will be HTML 5.0 with XML standards.