Prerequisites

Raw Materials · 95 words · 1 min read

HTML: Markup for the Masses

How a simple markup language made document publishing accessible to anyone with a text editor.

#Not a Programming Language

HTML was never meant to be a programming language. It was a markup language — a way to annotate text with structural meaning. Berners-Lee borrowed from SGML, stripping away the complexity to create something any physicist at CERN could learn in an afternoon.

<html>
  <head><title>My First Page</title></head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello, World Wide Web</h1>
    <p>This is a <a href="http://info.cern.ch">hyperlink</a>.</p>
  </body>
</html>

#The Killer Feature

The <a> tag — the humble hyperlink — was what made HTML revolutionary. It turned isolated documents into a connected web. Click a link, and you’re on a different server, in a different country, reading a different author’s work. No installation, no download, no permission needed.