HTML and its History
HTML and how it came about
HTML has an interesting development history. When HTML (then termed simply HTML 1) was first written by Tim Berners-Lee, it was very basic. During the time HTML was unfolding, Marc Anderson wrote the Mosaic browser that used extensions to HTML that were not in Berners-Lee's original specification. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) (a precursor to the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and an existing standards-setting organization) worked up the HTML 2.0 specification in mid 1994 to try to make sense of this outgrowth of HTML extensions and commonly used tags that weren't specified in HTML 2.0.
HTML 2.0. was outdated by the time W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) was founded.W3C formed the Editorial Review Board expressly to rein in Microsoft and Netscape's divergent adoption of HTML features and extensions.
The resulting specifications were published in 1996 and called HTML 3.2 but did not address Java, ActiveX, Streaming audio, and other Multimedia and web programming developments, HTML 3.2 was also already obsolete when it became a recommendation.
The HTML working group has a broader vendor base and should receive wider acceptance for it specification, code hyper named "Cougar" and now called HTML 4.0, because the group's goal is to map out future directions for HTML, rather than simply rectifying existing HTML.