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During 1980, IBM developed General Markup Language (GML), after which the (ANSI) American National
Standard Institute published a working draft of Standard GML or SGML.
SGML, which was comparatively a higher level markup language, was adopted by the US Internal Revenue
Service and Department of Defense, USA.
Simplifying further, HTML was developed in 1990 as a subset of SGML, whose credit goes to Tim Berners
Lee, a scientist at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, a European practical physics
Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland).
GML SGML HTML
HTML and SGML, though are from the same family but only a few browsers support both. HTML was
designed to create web pages that can be viewed on any type of computer architecture or by using any
web browser on Internet.
Notes
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): Tim Berners-Lee proposed for formation of a consortium to
handle the problems of establishing standards for HTML and HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), for
compliance and approvals. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in 1994 with the goal
to develop and set common standards for World Wide Web. It is hosted by Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in the USA, INFERIA in France and Keio University. The members of its committee are
representatives of World Wide Web companies, including organizations such as Microsoft, Netscape,
Sun Microsystems, IBM and Others.
EVOLUTION OF HTML
HTML was developed in the following stages:
Level 0: This was the first stage. At this stage, HTML used structural elements that were supported by
all web browsers.
Level 1: This was the second stage of development and it included enhanced features such as text
highlighting and graphics, this stage of HTML was supported by standard web browsers.
Level 2: This was the third stage of development. At this stage, certain interactive features were used
such as list boxes, buttons, etc.
Level 3: This was the fourth stage of development and it included attractive features like sound, video,
frames, etc. This stage also supported mathematical equations and formulae.
Level 4: This is the present level of HTML which includes many advanced features and is an enhancement
over level 3.
FEATURES OF HTML
HTML has following features:
HTML is neither a word processing tool, nor a programming language, rather it is a markup language
which differs completely from the programming languages.
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