You see it everyday. You use it all the time; but, do you know the story behind HTML? HTML and the World Wide Web, for that matter, began in a very unlikely place, CERN. Yes, that's the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. It's located in Geneva, Switzerland (and was made infamous in a scene or two from Dan Brown's immensely popular fictional novel, The DaVinci Code).

At the end of the 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee, was employed in the computing services division of CERN. He wanted to find a way for researchers to be able to link to and share documentation over a computer network. He based his findings on research conducted by Vannavar Bush back in the 1940s. Bush was a Tuft-trained engineer who came up with the "memex" concept, which is quite similar to the hypertext principle. Hypertext is a formatted text that includes links to other pages of text or media, which become accessible by clicking on or selecting the link.

The word hypertext was coined by Ted Nelson, an American, who, along with Andres van Dam, worked on developing the Hypertext Editing System at Brown University in the mid to late 60s. This program organized data into two main types links and branching text. It allowed end-users to edit massive amounts of text and supported links within a document that could link to other parts of the same document or another document altogether. Unfortunately, the program was pretty inefficient.

Doug Engelbart, however, would soon change all that. Although he had begun to work on the NLS the oNLine System at Stanford University several years earlier, it would not be until the end of the 60s that this technology would fully take shape. The NLS system was a groupware application that facilitated the creation of digital libraries. It also allowed storage and retrieval of electronic documents using hypertext technology. It allowed users to email each other and had a GUI (graphical user interface) that mimicked a windows-type of environment.

Of course, van Dam, Nelson and Engelbart would continue to improve upon these technologies. Others would abound throughout the 70s and 80s. However, it wasn't until Berners-Lee that the world became aware of the glory of hypertext-ing. In the early 80s, Berners-Lee had created a program called Enquire which allowed him to remember people and their research. It was a personal memory saver. Upon his return to CERN later on in the decade, Berners-Lee decided to expand upon this idea. He had a vision of a global information space that was linked to all computers and available to just about anyone anywhere.

Berners-Lee is often called the inventor of the web. However, the technology was largely available prior to his creations. He took hypertext and networking protocols and combined the technology to weave the web. Regardless, he did author HTML which is Hypertext Markup Language. It is an SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), which is what we call an internationally-agreed upon way to mark up text into structural units like paragraphs, headings and so forth. HTML uses a lot of the same formatting tags such as the following:

TITLE <title></title>
PARAGRAPH <p></p>
LIST <li></li>
HEADINGS <h1><h2><h3>

The major difference is that Berners-Lee included a way for programmers to code in hypertext links so that the end-user could link to other documents within a web page. The anchor tag and "href" link are his idea. He also created the URL (Uniform Resource Locator). This device gives the location of the computer, a file path on the machine, and the internet protocol used to retrieve the file.

Mr. Berners-Lee also publicized his findings and worked to make them accessible to others. HTML was still largely an open-source environment at this time. As others became aware of the new language and saw its value, HTML started to become a mish-mash of different codes and such. Some waned to hold onto the technology and control it. Fortunately, in the mid-90s, the World Wide Web Consortium was formed. Under the leadership of Berners-Lee, this super-group of web developers have remained committed to making the web and its technology available to the internet community at large and improving up on it constantly.

Over the past ten or twelve years, HTML has gone through many changes. Some are not as readily embraced by purists as others. Currently, we're in version 4.01. HTML is currently being extended by more interactive and multimedia-friendly versions such as XHTML and DHTML. However, HTML is here to stay and will continue to evolve. It has a great history and one that is worth knowing no matter what your familiarity level with the technology is. It has changed our lives and earned Tim Berners-Lee not only his knighthood (he's a British citizen) but also a place on the list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.