In this lesson, you will learn a brief history of HTML. HTML is the language that is used to create web pages. Dreamweaver allows you to create those web pages without you having to really do anything with the code. But it's important to understand a little bit about how we got to where we are today with HTML code. Before we get into HTML's history, we need to talk a little bit about what HTML is. Well, HTML is a markup language. Well, what does it mean by saying a markup language? Well, we have tags, and those tags open and close around our content. Those tags format the content that is in the tags. So we wrap the tags, we open it up, and we close it, and any of the content that is inside of those tags gets formatted depending upon the type of tag there is. For example, with an H1 tag, that's a heading one tag. So it makes our type in there very large and prominent on the page. So HTML tags define the text content on the page, but also, HTML defines areas of the page. We use the div or division tag to divide up our page into boxes of content. The footer tag is a relatively new tag that defines either the footer of the page or the footer of an area of the page. So HTML is a markup language that contains lots of different tags that define how we see things on the page. The versions. Well. HTML 1 was born right around 1990, and between 1990 and 1998, there were three different versions of HTML, but HTML really hit its stride with HTML 4 in 1998. Shortly after that came XHTML, extensible markup language, which is a variation, a more strict variation of HTML. And then in 2008, HTML 5 was launched, and that's the current version of HTML that we use today. So what are the differences between them? HTML 4 was launched in 1998, so prior to that, we had HTML 1 up through HTML 3.2. Now HTML was known for its loose code. What does that mean? Well, tags didn't necessarily have to be closed. You could choose to have uppercase tags or lowercase tags, or a combination of both on your pages. The attribute values didn't have to have quotes around them. And up until this point, we were defining the text of our page using a font tag, and it had to be wrapped around individual areas of type, making for a lot of work when defining text content. But with HTML 4, font tags began to be replaced by cascading style sheets. Now XHTML is a much more strict code. XHTML came about right around 2000, and that was when people started to build pages, especially e-commerce pages, and there was a lot of manual labor to code up those pages. So people thought, wouldn't it be easier for us to build pages based on a database? And so XML is extensible markup language, and it's a language of databases. And so XML is very strict. And because of that, HTML had to be changed to be a little bit more strict. So all tags must close in XHTML. All tags must be lowercase, and all attribute values must have quotes around them. The end of Flash. Up until this point, any time there was any type of interactivity on a page or an animation on a page, it was done using Flash. Flash was a proprietary software owned by Adobe. But when the iPhone was released by Apple in 2007, they decided there was going to be no SWF support. And so the World Wide Web Consortium realized they had to transition to some other way of making our pages interactive and making animations on the pages. So the HTML 5 family was launched in 2008. It took a number of years though, before it became the standard with which pages were built. And the reason for that was that it took a while for it to be fully supported by all browsers, because the browsers out there, Chrome and Firefox and Safari, they had to be reconfigured to support the new markup language that came with HTML 5, to support the animation and transition features that came with CSS3, and to support the Java Script that was being used in replace of Flash for the animations, as well as the interactivity. So what we currently create in Dreamweaver are pages that are built on the HTML5 markup language, but it is important to know the history behind this and to know that when you create pages, you're creating using the HTML5 family. But if you are charged with editing pages, some of those pages might have been created using an earlier version of HTML, and so this way, you'll be a little bit familiar with what you might encounter when you are editing pages. So in this lesson, you learned a brief history of HTML.
