Secret Origins of HTML

Subject: Re: HTML history
From: jorn@mcs.com (Jorn Barger)
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.misc

Samir/Sefian Ghazi <blizzard@globalserve.net> wrote:
> Hi!
> I am actually doing a research on the history of HTML programmation.
> I would like if anybody would know some sites on the internet that could
> help me.
>
> Thanks

Blizzard, you've come to the right place, because almost anywhere else on the Internet they'll give you some cock-and-bull folktale about SGML and Tim Berners-Lee... but in fact, every HTML tag has a long and rich history that's never really been spelled out by anyone before.

HEAD and BODY of course were the first tags, going back long before humans or mammals or even dinosaurs.

Much later, the Ice Age drove primitive humans into caves, where they invented PRE to make cave paintings possible. (Some argue that the cold temperatures also gave birth to BR around this time.)

The first TITLE was probably the Egyptian 'pharaoh', but it wasn't until the revolutionary movements of the 19th century that this one became available for the average joe.

In ancient times, *all* speech was considered STRONG, so no tag was needed, but instead WEAK was used, only when discussing others' stupidity. It wasn't until Copernicus and Darwin reduced human pride to almost nothing that WEAK overtook STRONG in popularity, so that a special tag for STRONG finally became useful.

EMphasis, though, in the form of hand or arm gestures, was so common that it's believed to have be depicted in the _angle-bracket_ or 'handwave' notation commonly used for all tags.

UnorderedLists were obviously a Greek invention, followed quickly by the Romans' OrderedLists. The Chinese invented BLOCKQUOTE around the year 500, using carved wood.

BLINK was invented by an anonymous lighthousekeeper, made popular by the neon sign industry, and brought to perfection by the inventor of the VCR.

BANNER was also popularized by the ad industry, but it took 1980s conceptual artist Jenny Holzer to integrate all the other tags into BANNER, a truly revolutionary concept shamelessly plagiarised by Berners-Lee and the 'inventors' of SGML.

ALT, of course, was a parallel invention of Kibo's.