HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language

HTML is the document tag language used in pages of the World Wide Web. One might say that Web pages are essentially 'made up' of HTML -- the protocol defines the building blocks of the Web itself.

HTML was first proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. It was conceptually (and somewhat syntactically) derived from SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), a far older language used primarily in the print industry dating back to the 1960's.

HTML succeeded as the primary hypertext document language (versus competitors such as Xanadu, or even proprietary online service languages such as AOL's Blackbird) because of its extreme simplicity. For example, to make a string italicized, one simple enclosed the string in tags like so:

(TAG) words to be italicized (/TAG)

(Answers does not allow HTML, so I have to illustrate this without the actual HTML tag I would normally use)

Thus, one did not have to be a 'techie' to start making Web pages: the basics of the early Web could be grasped in an afternoon.

Another significant contribution to early HTML was the implementation of a custom inline image tag by NCSA for their Mosaic browser. With this one simple innovation, the Web became multimedia for the first time.

HTML has grown and been extended quite a bit since the early days, but the basics remain the same.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGML

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