HTML5 Developer’s Cookbook

Introduction

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a core language for creating and structuring web pages. For more than 20 years developers have been writing HTML, and for the first few years the language underwent radical changes, but in the late 1990s things slowed down a bit. Until now.

A Brief History of HTML

In 1991 Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote a document called “HTML Tags,” which described 20 elements that would be used for writing web documents. By mid-1993 the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) had published a proposal for the first HTML specification. The proposal draft expired, and it was not until November 1995 that the first specification was published: not HTML 1.0, but HTML 2.0.

HTML 3.2 was released in 1997, and this was followed ...