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History of HTML — From GML to the Living Standard
HTML's markup ancestry runs through SGML to IBM's GML, which three engineers developed in 1969 and named with their initials. Tim Berners-Lee proposed the web at CERN in 1989 and implemented HTML as part of it in 1990. Browser competition, XHTML, the W3C/WHATWG split, HTML5 and Flash's retirement explain why its history includes arguments about compatibility as well as new tags.