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Learning To Love the Code: HTML As a Tool in the Writing Classroom | Margaret Batschelet

A (Very) Brief History of HTML

HTML was originally designed by Tim Berners-Lee as a "common, basic lingua franca that any computer would be required to understand [. . .] a simple hypertext language that would be able to provide basic hypertext navigation, menus, and simple documentation" (Weaving the Web 40). Berners-Lee chose to base HTML on an existing markup language, SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), that was already in widespread use for documentation.

Contrasted with SGML, which includes "so many options, exceptions, and tangled syntaxes that it became too complicated for most mortals to use" (Price 45), HTML was deliberately simplified. However, Berners-Lee intended that "HTML should convey the structure of a hypertext document, but not details of its presentation. This was the only way to get it to display reasonably on any of a very wide variety of different screens and sizes of paper" (41). To deal with web page "presentation," (i.e., page layout and design) Håkon Lie and Bert Bos helped to develop Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) at the World Wide Web Consortium. CSS was released in two versions, CSS1 in 1996 and CSS2 in 1998. Browsers that were capable of reading both CSS1 and CSS2 began appearing in 2000-2001. According to Lie and Bos, CSS was created to "better specify the appearance of [. . .] HTML pages as well as make [. . .] pages available to more Web users worldwide" (2). In addition, "CSS, by allowing authors to express their desire for influence over document presentation will help HTML remain the simple little language it was meant to be" (9). However, a number of Web users and developers in the late 1990s came to the conclusion that that "simple little language" wasn't enough to deal with the shifting information needs of the Web during this century. As information became automated, i.e., linked to databases, more complex languages were required for "content management"—what Jeffrey Veen calls "middleware" (Art and Science of Web Design 221). These programs ranged from the relatively simple (e.g., PHP and ASP) to the extremely complex (e.g., ColdFusion). Developers were forced to rely on this middleware to translate the content lodged in databases into the interfaces created with HTML. The World Wide Web Consortium responded with a radical revision of HTML, upgrading to a more "SGML-like" language called XML and a companion version of HTML called XHTML (Jonathan and Lisa Price describe XML as "SGML lite" [47]).

Back to Rationale for Teaching HTML

Citation Format: Batschelet, Margaret. "Learning To Love the Code: HTML As a Tool in the Writing Classroom." The Writing Instructor. 2004. http://www.writinginstructor.org/files/batschelet/ (Date Accessed).
Review Process: Margaret Batschelet's hypertext was accepted for publication following blind, peer review.