A Short HTML History

HTML developed a few years ago as a subset of SGML (Structure Generalized Mark-up Language) which is a higher-level mark-up language that has long been a favorite of the Department of Defense. Like HTML, it describes formatting and hypertext links, and it defines different components of a document. HTML is definitely the simpler of the two, and although they are related, there are few browsers that support both.

Because HTML was conceived for transmission over the Internet (in the form of Web pages) it is much simpler than SGML, which is more of an application-oriented document format. While it's true that many programs can load, edit, create, and save files in the SGML format (just as many programs can create and save programs in the Microsoft Word format), SGML is not exactly ideal for transmission across the Internet to many different types of computers, users, and browser applications.

HTML is more suited to this task. Designed with these considerations in mind, HTML lets you, the designer, create pages that you are reasonable sure can be read by the entire population of the Web. Even users who are unable to view your graphics, for instance, can experience the bulk of what you're communicating if you design your HTML pages properly.

At the same time, HTML is a simple enough format (at least currently) that typical computer users can generate HTML documents without the benefit of a special application. Creating a WordPerfect-format document would be rather difficult by hand (including all of the required text size, font, page break, column, margin, and other information), even if it weren't a "proprietary"—that is, nonpublic—document format.

HTML is a public standard, and simple enough that you can get through a book like this one and have a very strong ability to create HTML documents from scratch. This simplicity is part of a trade-off, as HTML-format documents don't offer nearly the precision of control or depth of formatting options that a WordPerfect- or Adobe PageMaker-formatted document would.