HTML is the brainchild of Sir Tim Berners-Lee who invented it as a solution to an issue he faced in his job at CERN - namely the ease of data transfer throughout their site. The initial system, created in 1980 and called ENQUIRE, was the world's very first web-browser and consisted of nothing more than a simple hypertext browser.
In 1991, the first HTML standards were released for public use in a document called "HTML Tags" which describes the first 18 elements.
Since then, the standards have been updated many times:
- HTML 2 in 1995.
- HTML 3 in Early 1997.
- HTML 4 in Late 1997.
- HTML 5 in 2014 [current version: 5.2]. (minor versions skipped)