Have you ever thought about the early pioneers who made it possible to read webpages like the one you‘re looking at now? Sure, we know names like Tim Berners-Lee, but there were lesser-known visionaries laying the foundations decades earlier. One of the most important was an attorney named Charles Goldfarb, who developed some of the key concepts in 1969 that every single website still relies on today.
Let‘s look at the problems Goldfarb was trying to solve and how his innovations eventually gave birth to the webpages, documents, and information sharing systems most of us take for granted in our daily lives.
The Brith of a Breakthrough Idea
In 1960s America, early office computers were isolated machines focused on crunching numbers, not documents. Powerful as they were for basic data processing tasks, they had no way to interpret complex paper reports or legal contracts into an electronic format easily analyzed by a machine. To do anything useful with a long document – even something as simple as automatically formatting the page numbers – meant utterly frustrating manual effort.
39 year-old attorney Charles Goldfarb felt this irritation profoundly dealing with lengthy, densely worded court cases full of precedents, decisions, and citations in his law firm. He dreamed of a system that could automagically index, cross-reference, and search documents so he could instantly find that one pivotal paragraph across a hundred pages. But in 1969 the technology simply didn‘t exist.
So Charles Goldfarb decided to invent it himself.
Goldfarb‘s breakthrough idea? Separating the content and structure of documents from their visual presentation – an acceptance speech from the structure of a legal motion, for example. He created simple markup tags like <precedent> or <argument> that labeled document pieces by their role, not their look on the printed page.
And thus, standing over his trusty typewriter, lawyer Charles Goldfarb accidentally laid the conceptual foundation for every single webpage and website.
GML: The Web‘s Baby Pictures
By 1970 Goldfarb had developed the first markup language, Generalized Markup Language (GML), put to use at IBM. It let teams collaborate on documents that could be automatically reformatted across the company.
Here‘s a quick peek comparing early GML to today‘s HTML webpages:
| Feature | Generalized Markup Language (1969) | HTML5 Webpages |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Structure documents for machines | Structure webpages for machines |
| Tags | <paragraph>, <date> | <p>, <time> |
| Machine-readable? | ✅ | ✅ |
| Human-readable? | ✅ | ✅ |
| Still used? | ❌ | ✅ |
Though limited by the technology of the ‘60s, GML pioneered concepts so fundamental that we use them in nearly every document ever created since – web or otherwise.
Growing Up Into SGML…and Eventually HTML
In 1974 Goldfarb helped lead an 80-person team to evolve GML into the more complete Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). IBM rapidly adopted SGML for its technical documentation, and over the next decade it became an industry standard for managing complex documents.
But SGML prioritized power over simplicity, which excited computer programmers but scared away casual users. Inspired by Goldfarb‘s work separating content from presentation decades earlier, Tim Berners-Lee used SGML concepts as the springboard for HTML – a simpler subset focused entirely on webpages.
Launched in 1991, HTML retained Goldfarb‘s key ideas of markup tags representing structure, not style. That familiar <p> tag denoting a paragraph in a webpage? A direct descendant of Goldfarb‘s innovative <paragraph> tag all the way back in the ‘60s!
So while SGML tackled advanced document management for airlines, governments, and mega-corporations, this newfangled Hypertext Markup Language targeted basic document creation and sharing for everyday people. Thanks to HTML‘s accessibility, the web exploded overnight.
Today over 1.9 billion websites rely on HTML – all tracing their lineage back to pioneering concepts birthed in a law office by Charles Goldfarb.
