HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is not a computer programming language, but a system for marking up plain-text documents so that they can be used as World Wide Web pages on the Internet. HTML codes are placed in a document to define its layout, structural organization, and formatting as a Web document.

The Internet has been evolving since the 1960s. Early usage was limited to text only (no graphics) and required knowledge of computer languages. In 1991 a young man named Tim Berners-Lee introduced a new way of presenting, finding, and retrieving information over the Internet. The World Wide Web system is based on special text coding to prepare documents and special viewing software called Web browsers that are programmed to recognize the codes and present the documents in a rich, colorful, and interactive format.

Berners-Lee used elements of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) to format Web...