3.10 Why HTML?

Most “How To” blog posts don’t require us to know anything intricate about HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and if you know just the basics of HTML, you’re probably further along than you can imagine. But why do we need HTML? In her video, “HTML Essential Training,” Web Designer and Developer Advocate at Mozilla, Jen Simmons, gives us a brief look at HTML’s role in web design.

In the very first chapter, Simmons explains that the role of HTML is essentially to tell the user’s computer what the things they are seeing on their screen are. She goes on to talk about other languages, like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript (which she defines as a programming language used to create a more interactive web design), that make up the Web. But I’d like to take a bird’s eye look at HTML, so I scavenged for a few articles on the subject and chose one that I like best to peruse.

“HTML: Origins and Purpose“, by Scott Loban offers a good number of pages on the subject. With 15 years of designing and business applications development experience, in a variety of technical environments, Loban is a knowledgeable resource in HTML.

Loban works as a Systems Architect for Stellcom, in San Diego, which is a wireless hardware and software engineering firm. He is also the technical lead in the Wireless Applications Integration division.

HTML at its Roots

Loban, like Simmons, points out that there are many technologies that help in creating interactive web applications, but HTML is at the core of most Web applications, because it is the standard markup language for creating Web pages, in general. HTML came to prominence in the late 1990’s (via Wikipedia).

“A markup language doesn’t dictate the methods used to display the content, nor does it have foreknowledge of the target context, so this control is imprecise,” Loban says of HTML and he also echoes that “the purpose of HTML is to provide a set of general rules that suggest how content should look when rendered.” Web browsers like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox read HTML documents and display them correctly on a computer screen. Over the years, there have been dozens of versions of HTML. Its improvement works to create the best experience when viewing web pages, as the early tools used to view the web were pretty primitive. With more people and businesses looking to take advantage in the new web-based medium, the evolution of tools and resources was inevitable.

Loban closes out his first chapter by stating that “Publishing HTML-formatted documents on the Internet via the World Wide Web proved to be the answer to these needs.” That is reflected in how important the world wide web has been in our personal and business lives.

This is a revised version of a blog post titled Why HTML? on Web Publishing Unanimous.