HTML
The language of every web page
Created
1991 at CERN
Created by
Tim Berners-Lee
Type
Markup language
First standard
HTML 2.0 (1995)
Standard today
WHATWG Living Standard
File extension
.html / .htm
Popularity
~96% of all websites
Works with
CSS + JavaScript
What is HTML?
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the standard language every web page is written in. It is not a programming language. It is a markup language: you wrap content in tags that tell the browser what each piece is (a heading, a paragraph, an image, a link, a table) and the browser turns that structure into the page you see.
Every website you have ever visited, including this one, starts life as an HTML document.
A short history
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1989 | Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, writes Information Management: A Proposal, imagining a web of hyperlinked documents for researchers. |
| 1991 | He publishes HTML Tags, the first informal specification, along with the world's first website (info.cern.ch). |
| 1993 | The Mosaic browser makes the web graphical (and popular). Early HTML drafts circulate through the IETF. |
| 1995 | HTML 2.0, the first real HTML standard, is published. |
| 1997 | The freshly founded W3C ships HTML 3.2, adding tables, scripts and improved forms. |
| 1999 | HTML 4.01 lands: stylesheets take over presentation, and semantic markup becomes the goal. |
| 2000s | An XML-based detour (XHTML) insists on strictness. The web largely disagrees. |
| 2014 | HTML5 becomes a W3C Recommendation: <video>, <audio>, <canvas>, semantic elements, offline apps. |
| 2019+ | Development moves to the WHATWG Living Standard. HTML is now updated continuously instead of in numbered versions. |
How it works
A browser receives an HTML document and parses it top-to-bottom, building a tree of objects called the DOM (Document Object Model). CSS styles that tree and JavaScript can manipulate it, but the skeleton of the page always comes from the HTML itself.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>My first page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello, world!</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph of text.</p>
</body>
</html>What it is used for
- Websites and web apps: every page on the public web, from personal blogs to full application suites like Google Docs.
- Email: marketing and transactional email is hand-built HTML.
- Documentation: READMEs render as HTML on GitHub; help centers are HTML.
- Desktop and mobile apps: Electron apps such as VS Code, Slack and Discord are HTML under the hood.
Who uses it
Short answer: everyone who touches the web.
Front-end developers write it daily. Back-end developers generate it. Designers read it. Content creators author it through editors. It powers Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon and roughly every other site on the internet, and it consistently ranks among the most-used technologies in developer surveys.
Why learn HTML first
HTML is the foundation everything else stands on:
- CSS styles what HTML structures. You need the structure before you can style it.
- JavaScript manipulates the DOM, which only exists once HTML defines it.
- It has the gentlest learning curve in tech: tags read like English, results are instant, and there is nothing to install. Just a browser and a text editor.
Your first page
Try editing the code below. This course lets you experiment as you read:
How this course works
Each chapter covers one topic with short explanations, copy-paste-ready examples and live "Try it Yourself" editors. Read in order or jump around. Sign in with your Scolar account to tick chapters off as you finish them, and continue to the introduction chapter when you are ready.