#100DaysOfWeb in Python Transcripts
Chapter: Days 5-8: HTML and HTML5
Lecture: A little HTML history

Login or purchase this course to watch this video and the rest of the course contents.
0:00 Before we start writing some HTML let's just talk briefly about its timeline when it was introduced, and what features were added when.
0:09 HTML starts way back in 1990, 91, with Tim Berners-Lee where he invented HTML back at CERN. And it was really meant to just be linking documents.
0:19 All right, so that's kind of how it started. Hyperlinks, basic non interactive documents. In 1995 to five years later
0:27 HTML 2 was released and that added form elements such as text boxes and option buttons. Ability to change the background
0:34 and better tables and things like that. We quickly get to HTML 3.2. There was, you know HTML is very standards driven
0:43 and they tried to do some stuff for HTML 3 and apparently that failed or didn't go anywhere. So they rebooted that effort as HTML 3.2.
0:52 And here we have better supports for tables still. Applets, text floating around images, things like that. Superscripts, subscripts.
1:00 So still working on this document in this non interactive like document world. Moving ahead quickly now. In 1999, remember this is the Dot Com boom.
1:10 Pets.com and all that craziness. We get HTML4 and finally we get style sheets. So until then, you wanted to style something
1:18 you would have to put the styles on the elements. Think how tedious that must have been, right? That was horrible if you wanted to have
1:25 a common design across your whole site. So here we have style sheets that allows us to style all of our site not just embedded in each individual page
1:33 and scripting ability for multimedia elements. Sort of a competitor to HTML4 is XHTML. So HTML4 is a little bit more loose.
1:44 It doesn't have to be an exact super set of XML. And remember around the 2000's this is like the height of XML on a text base.
1:54 We have XML SOAP web services, all sorts of stuff like that. We have style sheets, XSSLT, transforms all those kinds of things for XML.
2:02 So there was a push to take HTML and make it proper parsable XML, all right? Everything is properly closed. You know that got some traction
2:11 but really modern day HTML is not nearly that strict and it's probably a good thing. However, we've been moving pretty quick up til here.
2:20 In 1999, 2000, we get these two competing standards and then there's a long waiting period. As time goes on and on all the way out to 2014.
2:34 In 2014, HTML5 comes along. That was a long period there of not too many things being released.
2:42 This release of HTML is meant to replace things like Flash. Remember Flash, you had to have Flash to watch this video.
2:49 Well replace those types of things with built-in video elements and audio elements and so on. Also allowed for web applications to be much more like
2:57 well, applications and not documents, right? They can access local storage, the little databases
3:03 they can run in offline mode, all those kinds of things. They have location based services, mapping and whatnot.
3:09 And also changing the syntax a little bit to separate content from presentation. When you look at some of the features
3:16 especially around validation and stuff of HTML5 you will see it's decidedly not an XML document, all right.
3:22 You might have attributes that don't have values and things like that. So this is more of a carrying on of HTML4 heritage than the XHTML.
3:29 So basically 15 years between major new versions here. But now we have HTML5 we're kind of moving along
3:37 to building real applications on the web properly.


Talk Python's Mastodon Michael Kennedy's Mastodon