What HTML/XML Does

A Brief History of HTML and XML

Since the internet exploding back in the late nineties, a ton of terms have been birthed in the public mind. HTML, Javascript, Java (which is entirely separate from Javascript), CSS, XHTML, and XML. Just to name a few. And that's just in the area of web development. In my opinion, though, XML is the most fun idea ever.

What is XML? To put it deceivingly simply: it's labels for the internet. XML allows you to identify pieces of information, describe what they are and how a web browser should use them. The fun part, though, is how much more flexible it is than it's predecessor, HTML.

HTML

HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is one of the biggest reasons the internet is so useful today. Prior to HTML, when the internet was still just a government and university project, all you could do was pass entire documents back and forth. Straight text. No formatting, no bold, no font size. No nothing. Just. Text.

In the late eighties, early nineties, two guys, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau worked together to create what would become a markup language that was used to describe what certain parts of the document were. It used tags that were a word or letter inside two carrot brackets < >. For example, the "h1" tag (< h1 >) was used to describe a header section, while the "p" tag (< p >) was used to describe a paragraph. You could nest these tags as well, so you could have a header inside paragraph, and so on. HTML included tags for quotes, tables, listed items, and a bunch of other fun stuff.

The Problem

HTML changed the way the internet worked. To a limited extent, you could use some HTML properties to describe how things looked. You could use a table to organize the layout of a page, you could change the color of text to distinguish it from other text. And best of all, the link tag (< a >) allowed you to link to multiple pages.