What Is HTML?

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, and it was invented by Sir Timothy Berners-Lee in the early 1990s to solve the problem of quickly and efficiently distributing documents between scientists around the world who were working with experimenters at CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, where the Large Hadron Collider is now also situated).

The Internet was already in place and there were tens of thousands of computers connected to each other using it, but there was no easy means of publishing content for all to see, and in which references to other documents could be easily followed. So Berners-Lee created a hyperlinking framework he called the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, or HTTP (the same set of letters at the front of a web address). He also created a language to use this protocol, which he called HTML (for Hyper Text Markup Language).