HTML was first conceived of by Tim Berners-Lee in the last half of 1990 and was drafted into official documentation in 1995. It was updated again in 1997 to 3.2 again in 1998 to 4.0 1999 4.01 and finally in 2000 ISO HTML which was based on HTML 4.01 Strict. So what has been going on in between 2000 and 2010? The updates were coming fast and furious a few years at a time and well, then in 2008 the W3C released a working draft of HTML 5.
That’s 8 years, no wait, we’re still waiting on it, that’s 10 years and counting for Flash becoming the lynch pin of the internet. We couldn’t have the web we have today if we didn’t have Flash or Java or graphics and we don’t expect them to go away anytime soon. So this is the web today, let’s look at the direction of tomorrows web.
I was lucky enough to sit in on a talk by Hakon Wium Lie CTO of Opera & the Father of CSS. In case you don’t know, CSS is a Cascading Style Sheet which essentially sits on top of the HTML to create the aesthetically pleasing web that we see today. The video above is a basic overview and explanation of how HTML 5 has evolved and what we can expect to see in CS3 as well. He shows off how coding tags are used and gives a comparison to how they are used today. Even if you know little about the web and coding, its an interesting watch, if you do know a bit, well, its always interesting to see how the Father of CSS explains the web.
Oh, if this is too basic for you, keep your panties on, I asked some tougher questions which i’ll be posting as a part of a series. For now, welcome to HTML5.
