Introduction to HTML
Resources
Video Script
Welcome back everyone. In this video, we’re going to be taking a look at the Hypertext Markup Language. This is a continuation of our previous videos where we talked about the history of the internet, as well as how the internet actually worked. Now, in those videos, we took a look at Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Hypertext Markup Language along with the web server and the technology that was used to actually serve those web pages. The first version of HTML that Sir Tim Berners-Lee released in 1990, was still a huge improvement over the content that was being served on the Internet at that time. We really had no unify language that we were able to use to distribute information on the web. HTML 1.0 brought that to light. Even though throughout the 90s, HTML was a pretty static language, meaning that our webpages were still pretty straightforward, there really wasn’t a whole lot of dynamic content. It wasn’t until Web 4.0 released and the late 90s and even into the early 2000s, where we started to make the transition to the Web 2.0 era, where we started to see a lot more social media type content, and very dynamic content being hosted on the web, like a lot of media as well. The big landmark version of HTML, HTML 4.0, was really important because this is also where Cascading Style Sheets came into play. Before, we could still style our web pages to a certain extent, but all of those styles were actually built into the page.
CSS allows us to separate those styles into their own files, into their own language, and allows us to better compartmentalize those styles and as well apply more dynamic styling to our actual web page. This gave not just a single web page, but our entire website, more uniform styling, and it made programming that much easier. Now, in 2014, we had a big gap between HTML 4.0, and HTML5. But in 2014, HTML5 started to bring light to a little bit more of the dynamic content that is Web 2.0. Before then, we really used a lot of Adobe Flash, which was really big in the 2000s, and even JavaScript as well, to a certain extent, to create that dynamic content that Web 2.0 really needed. Around 2014-2015, when HTML5 was released, things like Adobe Flash started to be deprecated, in favor of using pure HTML. Now, HTML5 started to add the capability of adding more dynamic content. And even with the new CSS versions that we actually have, we can do a lot of the things that we would typically need JavaScript for, and do it all in plain HTML and CSS.
Any web pages that you actually utilize today will most likely have a combination of these three technologies being used at that time. So HTML, JavaScript, or CSS in combination of. Now you don’t have to have all three of these to have an actual web page. You can do a web page or an entire website in just HTML. Without any styling, or without any CSS, you could still use embedded styling in your HTML. But most web pages are going to be a little bit more dynamic, a little bit more colorful and a little bit more streamlined, which requires the use of all three of these to make it a ubiquitous experience for the user, especially when we’re now living in a mobile era, where most people are actually browsing the web on their smartphones or their tablets. Throughout this module of videos, we’re going to be taking a look at HTML and CSS, as well as some basic JavaScript.