Siksha Sarovar

Siksha Sarovar (sikshasarovar.com) is a free educational web application that helps students in India learn programming and prepare for academic and competitive exams. The platform offers structured coding courses (C, C++, Python, Java, HTML, CSS, PHP, Power BI, AI, Machine Learning, Data Science), complete university curriculum notes for BCA/MCA students with previous year question papers, Class 10 and Class 12 CBSE/HBSE school notes, and dedicated preparation material for SSC, UPSC, Banking, Railway and other government exams. Browsing the site is completely free and requires no account. Users may optionally sign in with Google solely to save their learning progress, quiz scores and personal preferences across devices.

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Siksha Sarovar is a free e-learning platform for coding courses, BCA university notes and competitive exam preparation. Optional Google sign-in saves your learning progress across devices.

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2. HTML History & Evolution

Lesson 2 of 30 in the free HTML notes on Siksha Sarovar, written by Rohit Jangra.

Origin

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It was initially developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in late 1991 at CERN.

  • Motivation: To allow scientists to share research papers and documents electronically across different computer systems.
  • Result: It laid the foundation for the World Wide Web (WWW).

Evolution Timeline

HTML has undergone significant changes to support multimedia, scripting, and complex applications.

  • 1991 - HTML 1.0: Created by Tim Berners-Lee. Deeply basic, text-oriented, included tags like <h1> and <p> but no images or tables.
  • 1995 - HTML 2.0: The first standard version. Added forms (<input>) which made the web interactive.
  • 1997 - HTML 3.2: Recommended by W3C. Added tables, applets, and text-flow around images, but suffered from browser compatibility issues (Netscape vs IE).
  • 1999 - HTML 4.01: A major milestone. It separated structure (HTML) from presentation (CSS), cleaning up the code.
  • 2000 - XHTML 1.0: A stricter, XML-based version of HTML. It required perfect syntax (e.g., all tags must be closed, lowercase attributes).
  • 2004 - WHATWG: The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group formed to evolve HTML when W3C focused on XHTML 2.0.
  • 2014 - HTML5: published as a W3C Recommendation. It introduced semantic elements (<header>, <article>), multimedia (<video>, <audio>), and APIs (Geolocation, Canvas).

Role of W3C

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the international standards organization for the World Wide Web.

  • Function: To develop protocols and guidelines (like HTML, CSS) that ensure long-term growth of the Web.
  • Goal: Ensure that all browsers display web pages consistently.