Written in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, in Geneva -- not really a "specification" in any formal sense (there was never an official HTML 1.0 standard), just a short internal document called "HTML Tags", listing about twenty elements he'd put together to link physics papers to each other. Headings, paragraphs, lists, a hyperlink -- that was more or less the whole language. No images, no tables, and certainly nothing resembling a form: a visitor could read a page and click a link, and that was the entire interaction model on offer.
It would take until November 1995, with RFC 1866 (HTML 2.0), for the language to get anything like an official standard at all -- by which point forms had already crept in through what browsers were actually shipping in practice, standard or not. The rest of this page demos those later additions -- forms, tables, and CSS -- which this site also uses, further down.
Bold — Italic — Small
A horizontal rule sits below this line.
A <pre> block:
keeps whitespace
and line breaks
exactly as typed.Anchor navigation (jump to a named spot on the same page, <a name> + <a href="#name">): jump down to the anchor test.
Unordered:
Ordered:
Anchor test -- jump to: [Top] [Middle] [Bottom]
Everything below this point is NOT HTML 1.0; Forms are HTML 2.0 (1995), tables are HTML 3.2 (1997), and <style> is CSS (1996). Those are the official standardization dates, as with HTML 1.0 itself, browsers were often already doing this before the paperwork caught up. Netscape shipped table support before HTML 3.2 became a Recommendation, and early CSS drafts existed before CSS1 was finalized in December 1996.
| Left-aligned | Right-aligned |
|---|---|
| L1 | R1 |
| L2 | R2 |
On a modern browser, the line below this paragraph should be invisible.
If a link above brought you here, anchor navigation works on this browser: the URL fragment (#bottom) told it exactly where to scroll to, all the way at the end of the page. Try [Middle] and [Top] below too -- same mechanism, any position on the page, not just the very top or bottom.