HTML 4.0

By 1997, the internet had exploded in popularity, and web development had become more complex. To adapt to the growth, the W3C released HTML 4.0, which significantly expanded the capabilities of the language. HTML 4 introduced cascading style sheets integration and support for other scripting languages like JavaScript. These new features allowed for a separation of the page’s content and its visual design. This separation enabled cleaner code and easier site maintenance, while also allowing designers greater control over layout and styling. Before CSS, most visual styles had to be applied directly within HTML using font tags and attributes, which cluttered the code. HTML 4 introduced three different versions—Strict, Transitional, and Frameset—to help developers gradually adopt newer standards without breaking any existing websites.

HTML 4 also featured an improved internationalization, which made the web more accessible to non-English speakers through language attributes and better character encoding. This broader language support contributed to the web's rapid global growth in popularity. The standard also included enhancements for accessibility, making it easier to develop web content for users with disabilities using features like the accesskey and tabindex attributes. Support for assistive technologies was also added, helping users with disabilities navigate web content more effectively. HTML 4 also added support for script events like onClick, onChange, and onMouseOver, which enabled significantly more interactive web pages, soon giving rise to early web applications such as email platforms, real-time search engines, and customizable news. These changes made HTML a far more versatile and language, suitable for everything from blogs to enterprise-level web applications. Overall, HTML 4 was a major step forward in turning the web from a static document system into a more dynamic, user-end environment.