HTML was created in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN as a simple markup language to share scientific documents over the internet. It became the foundation for building web pages and the World Wide Web. The first web browser was released in 1993 and HTML continued evolving through versions like HTML 3.2 and HTML 4.0 with the World Wide Web Consortium establishing standards. HTML is a markup language that uses tags to structure and present content like text, headings, lists, links and images for display in a web browser.