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History of HTML

by WebAIM

History of HTML

The originators of HTML were scientists who wanted a standard means to share particle physics documents. They had little interest in the exact visual form of the document as seen on the computer screen. In fact, HTML was originally designed to enforce a clean separation of content structure and graphic design. The intent was to create a World Wide Web of pages that will display in every system and browser available, including browsers that "read" Web page text to visually impaired users and can be accurately interpreted by automated search and analysis engines.

The inventors of the Web did not realize the graphical and display potential of the Web, and as such, HTML was not designed with display considerations in mind. They were so concerned about making Web documents machine-friendly that they produced documents that only machines (or particle physicists) would want to read. In focusing solely on the structural logic of documents they ignored the need for the visual logic of graphic design and typography. This lack of a visual emphasis on the Web is what causes Web designers such stress in trying to get pages to look the way that they want them to look. This pressure is what caused browser software companies to begin to ignore the standards of proper HTML and allow additional visual and layout features or extensions of HTML work within their browsers.

For example, most graphic designers avoid using the standard heading tags in HTML (<h1>, <h2>, and so on) because they lack subtlety: in most Web browsers these tags make headlines look absurdly large (<h1>, <h2>) or ridiculously small (<h4>, <h5>, <h6>). But the header tags in HTML were not created with graphic design in mind. Their sole purpose is to designate a hierarchy of headline importance, so that both human readers and automated search engines can look at a document and easily determine its information structure. Only incidentally did browser designers create a visual hierarchy for HTML headers by assigning different type sizes and levels of boldness to each header element, though these type sizes tend to be somewhat limiting within the HTML language.

posted on Jun 5, 2007

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