Sujatars

 Profile Answers by Sujatars 

• Jul 30th, 2007

 

The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a simple markup language used to create hypertext documents that are portable from one platform to another. HTML documents are Standard Generalised Markup Language(SGML) documents with generic semantics that are appropriate for representing information from a wide range of applications.

Versions

HTML2.0
HTML 2.0 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force HTML Working Group in 1996.

HTML 2.0 is an outdated version of HTML. All browsers available on the market today, rely on newer versions of HTML. For a Web developer there is no need to study the HTML 2.0 standard.

HTML3.2
HTML 3.2 was released as a W3C Recommendation 14. January 1997. HTML 3.2 added widely-deployed (Netscape) features such as fonts, tables, applets, text-flow around images, superscripts and subscripts, to the existing HTML 2.0 Standard.

One of the elements that was added to the 1997 HTML 3.2 standard - the <font> tag - have introduced unnecessary complexity to the important task of separating HTML content (text) from its presentation (style). The <font> tag is expected to be removed from future versions of HTML. 

HTML4.0
HTML 4.0 was released as a W3C Recommendation 18. December 1997. A second release was issued on 24. April 1998 with only some editorial corrections.

The most important feature of HTML 4.0 is the introduction of style sheets (CSS). 

Our W3C CSS chapter summarizes the W3C CSS activities.

HTML4.01
HTML 4.01 was released as a W3C Recommendation 24. December 1999.

HTML 4.01 is a minor update of corrections and bug fixes in HTML 4.0.

W3C will not continue to develop HTML. Future W3C work will be focusing on XHTML