Origins

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The Web experience, as we know it, was officially born when Tim Berners-Lee at CERN ( le Conseil Europ en pour la Recherche Nucl aire, or the European Laboratory for Particle Physics) in Geneva designed HTML to allow people in the physics community to communicate with each other. In December 1990, HTML was released within CERN, and it became available to the public in the summer of 1991. In the grand tradition of Internet share-and-enjoy, CERN and Berners-Lee gave away the specifications for HTML, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and uniform resource locators (URLs).

Berners-Lee based HTML on the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Like XML, SGML is a meta-language and can be used to define other languages. Each language that's defined this way is called an SGML application. HTML is an SGML application.

For its part, SGML came about from research at IBM in the late 1960s into the generalized representation of text documents. Out of that research came GML (General Markup Language), a predecessor to SGML. In 1978, ANSI produced the first version of SGML. ANSI released the draft of the first SGML standard in 1985, and the standard itself in 1986. In a portent of things to come, CERN's Anders Berglund developed the SGML system that published the first SGML standard. CERN, of course, is the organization that later gave us HTML and the Web.

The US Department of Defense, many other government entities, and numerous large industries and corporations have settled on SGML as a document standard. Although SGML is complex and difficult to work with, its flexibility makes it attractive to industries in which document needs are complex and vary widely.

By most accounts, the reason SGML hasn't been adopted on a grander scale is its complexity. It's too complex for most people to work with successfully, in my opinion. HTML, on the other hand, is very simple and not very sophisticated. Unfortunately, for many needs, it's too simple.

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