I learned HTML around 2006, when I was in middle school. The origins of my interest stemmed from graphic design and being inspired by young, amateur web developers who built their own websites to showcase their work. The World Wide Web at the time was at the dawn of revolutionary change in the form of Web 2.0 and the emergence of social media networks. Myspace and Friendster were somewhat popular, and Facebook was not yet the tech titan it is today.
From my newfound knowledge, I situated myself in Web 1.0 and coded a small space for myself online. This did not last too long since it would be a year later that I would sign up for Facebook and eventually make it my new internet abode. But the time I ran my own websites on Freewebs and Geocities with my own designs and structure was very special to me. It was through my HTML output that I was able to creatively and wholly express myself to the world and anyone who may come across my website, eventually making some online friends along the way. Plus, it was easy for my 11-year-old brain to understand.
The days of individual, basic HTML websites are basically over, with these free hosting sites becoming defunct, static websites becoming relics. Nevertheless, I consider this era of the World Wide Web to be a greatly influential predecessor to the web as we know it today; interactive, social, data-laden, and gargantuan. Specifically, I consider HTML to be the language that made the evolution of the web so vast in breadth and depth because of its sound development by its inventor, the low barrier of entry to learning, and its power as a shared semantic system of the World Wide Web. HTML operates as the ideal tool for meaningful Internet connections between computers and people. I’ll explore the aspects of HTML that makes it a revolutionary technological tool that changed how we created and shared information in its early years.
HTML… in the eyes of its inventor
Thankfully the origins of HTML are no mystery, due to their extensive documentation by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The history of the Web is aptly shared in the form of web pages coded in the markup language itself. HTML was created as the standard language for Berners-Lee’s most significant invention, the World Wide Web. In 1989, he created the World Wide Web as an easily implementable and accessible solution to share information within CERN, the European research institution he worked for at the time (CERN).
To the world’s benefit, The World Wide Web and HTML did not remain proprietary technologies and instead became available to the public two years later. CERN technically owned the software and its rights, but released the World Wide Web software into public domain (Cailliau 2013). At the time, this decision made sense to its inventor and his first collaborator, Robert Cailliau.
In his opinion article, “Twenty years of a free and open www,” Cailliau explains their reasoning to opt for free use, as they “…were more interested in the excitement of making something useful than in getting rich, we decided to use the traditional CERN model for technology spin-off: make it freely available,” (Cailliau 2013). The technology could have probably paid off monetarily, and handsomely at that, but keeping the rights of the World Wide Web did not seem to align with the values of the organization most fundamentally linked to its invention.
Simply put, the rest is history. Making the software public domain was certainly the main catalyst for its widespread adoption, but I would argue that it also lies in the World Wide Web’s simplicity of HTML, the markup language that establishes the links of web pages together.
Tim Berners-Lee was meticulous and intentional with his inventing of HTML. In his proposal for CERN, he acknowledged the organization’s numerous requirements for his technology’s application, but none about the markup language itself (Berners-Lee 1989). But the conception and logic of HTML is documented in the book, “Raggett on HTML 4.” At the time, hypertext was becoming a popular technology that allowed users to read informational documents on a computer and easily reference other documents via links. The benefit of hypertext was its immediacy of access (Raggett 1998). Despite being conceptualized decades earlier, it is a part of the foundation of HTML. Hypertext (HT) is in the acronym after all. However, it had strenuous limitations.
To Berners-Lee, hypertext was not enough for his information management solution. Berners-Lee desired a form of text that was less cumbersome to use and universal (Hypertext was computer-specific at the time). It was only accessible in the form of separate software, each with their own interfaces. Hypertext was characteristically complex when used to create documents, and absence of standardization strained this complexity further (Raggett 1998). Hence the invention of HTML as a markup language. It would become the way to display text-based pages that would be delivered to computers via Berners-Lee’s other invention, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
The revolutionary nature of HTML as a markup language stemmed from Berners-Lee basing it on another markup language, SGML. SGML’s ability to be displayed universally and the standard of tags were attractive features. It saved time from creating a new language from scratch as well. As a result of using tags, HTML was easily interpretable by computers and users alike (Berners-Lee 1999). You did not need to buy additional technology like HyperCard, a hypertext software from Mac that came in the form of multiple floppy disks, to display text on the Internet.
Berners-Lee expands upon his philosophy influencing his invention in his book, “Weaving the Web.” In chapter four, ‘Protocols: Simple Rules for Global Systems,’ he stated that there had to be common standards of HTML so that computers could effortlessly talk to each other, irrespective of model or software. Also, he believed anyone should be able to publish information. HTML had to be basic to achieve these purposes. The “basic design rules” of HTML were “pragmatic, political even.” HTML was meant to mirror SGML’s cleanness through discernable tags. He even used the exact same tags at times (Berners-Lee 1999). Perhaps to some, tags like <p>, <b>, and <i> were intuitive to interpret (paragraph, bold, and italic). The most important tag was <a>, which stands for “anchor” and connects HTML documents together through clickable links (CERN).
The simplicity of HTML was also meant to facilitate its adoption by users by making it easy and fast to interpret on the computer. But the readability of HTML “was an unexpected boon” to Berners-Lee. Not too long after making the markup language available within CERN, people began to use HTML themselves (Berners-Lee 1999). Perhaps in hindsight, this should have not been surprising at all given HTML’s mirroring of another popular markup language and readability. After the World Wide Web became widely available, people utilized HTML to create a world of their own.
HTML… in the eyes of its authors
The proto-web was as simple as the code it was based on. The best example of this simplistic design is the first webpage ever put online. It was about the World Wide Web project and designed by Tim Berners-Lee himself on August 6, 1991. The webpage still exists. It essentially looks and operates as a document, but with links a user can click to view another page. With links such as “What’s Out There?”, “Help”, and “Technical”, users were provided with a readable guide to practical Web uses, including HTML. The aesthetics were as plain as a Word document.
A year after the first web page was released, there were 10 other websites launched. (Fischels 2021). Fast forward to today, there are an estimated 1.1 billion websites (NJ 2023), whose pages look much more elaborate, yet mostly serve the same initial purpose of providing linked information. But there is still one popular website that looks like that first HTML page that “reflect[s] commonly held beliefs about what the internet is for and how it should be used.” (Lingel 2020).
Craigslist was that website that emerged from the confines of email lists, and made a home on the World Wide Web in 1995 (Britannica 2023). It was and still is a platform for users to post classified ads of a variety of categories like job openings, household items for sale, and missed connections. Visit it today, and you’d think you traveled back in time to 1991, given its design in plain HTML; Times New Roman font on a white background, a visual callback to print classifieds.
In “An Internet for the People: The Politics and Promise of craigslist,” author Jessica Lingel evaluates the website as a beacon of the first Web values outlined by Berners-Lee; “access, reach, privacy.” (Lingel 2020). It’s a nearly 1-1 application: Some of Berners-Lee’s chapters on “Weaving the Web” are named ‘Privacy’ and ‘Going Global,’ Lingel tells the story of how craigslist became a website from an email list. Coding an email list was harder because they “had to be scripted by hand.” It was also very limited in how many emails a database could hold. HTML came into the picture in 1996 and its use was very intentional (Lingel 2020). As mentioned, the design of craigslist was also text on a white background, which facilitated fast loading times. Rob, a user who was interviewed for Lingel’s books, said craigslist was “a very light web experience, just background… no graphic ads.” Yet despite the web design capabilities of today, basic HTML remains the basis for the website’s current design. When a website at a certain point was serving 175,000 page views a day (Buckmaster 2008), lightness is key. Vanilla HTML provides that simplicity.
However, some users wanted more in terms of design across the web. Some found the design “dull, repurposed version of print” according to Roger Black in his article “Help Me Redesign the Web.” aspirations growing out of improving the design of the web inspired the emergence of new occupations. Of these were information architects and usability experts were salient (Black 2007). These new positions were meant to maximize one of the best and most useful benefits of HTML, linking pages with the <a> tag. The people in these newly created positions had to make the website easier to navigate.
Additionally, Google as a prominent ICT (Information and Communications Technology) came from addressing the information-related frustrations of going through the web. The web crawlers navigated through the web to archive and served search results by going through the links and capturing the right keywords (Google 2023). This could have not been done without the proper HTML tags.
The simplicity of HTML caused the growth of massive online, communal websites. It also inspired new design ideas from its simplicity. Finally, HTML’s format made the biggest search engines more functional in serving information to more users more efficiently.
Of course, the web is designed beyond HTML. Javascript, CSS, PHP are just a few options to optimize the structure and design of your website because the Web has become more than a tool to display and link documents. But the fundamentals remain the same. HTML tags establish a readable hierarchy of your text. The <a> tag creates links. There are even more tags that incorporate even more media like images, tables and videos (WHATWG 2023). Also, the tenets established by Berners-Lee of HTML lie at the heart of the HTML standards established and updated by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG). The syntax of HTML5 still utilizes the original tags, with more for enhancing design and specification. Though HTML can be seen as simple, it is still one of the most important elements of creating a website. We wouldn’t have 1.1 billion pages on the Web without it.