Shared post - Myth: "HTML was invented by Tim Berners-Lee"

submited by

Style Pass

2024-04-16 11:00:08

Go to any search engine and type in, "Who invented HTML" and you'll -- almost always -- be given the following answer (or some variation on it):

"Heresy," you proclaim! "Everyone knows Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who was knighted by the Queen and won of the Turing Award, created the HyperText Markup Language! You better have some serious proof to backup such an outlandish claim!"

Oh, wait. Hold up. I accidentally used the wrong screenshot. That's not HTML... that's SGML. A totally different language used several years before HTML.

SGML -- the Standard Generalized Markup Language (aka ISO 8879) -- was set as a standard back in 1986... 7 years before the release of the HTML 1.0 specification.

Over in Switzerland, at CERN ("Conseil européen pour la Recherche nucléaire" aka "European Organization for Nuclear Research"), Anders Berglund adopted SGML primarily for usage in formatting documentation.

That variation on SGML -- dubbed "SGMLguid" -- remained in usage at CERN for several years. And, in 1987, Tim Berners-Lee was hired as a contractor at CERN.