Structure Story for Makers

From basement punch cards to design-system playbooks, the people who kept wrangling document structure

In the MIT basement someone sighed, “I’m still aligning footnotes at 2 a.m.,” while an IBM researcher muttered, “Change one heading and the whole manual collapses.” RUNOFF, GML, and Scribe were taped together so mainframes could lay out reports without human babysitting.

A decade later ISO delegates complained, “Same document, different tags—we can’t exchange this,” so SGML emerged. At CERN Tim Berners-Lee pitched HTML as “just enough SGML with links,” and browser engineers later promised, “If we standardize HTML and the DOM, your scripts won’t break on rival browsers.”

Today design-system teams tell stakeholders, “Drop this custom element and the structure ships with it.” Tap a year to hear the worry, the fix, and the habit it left behind—each story keeps the jargon friendly so you can follow along without a standards body badge.

Selecting a year opens a dialog close to the button so you can keep your reading position.

1960s

Late-night pagination experiments

“My thesis is eating my sleep,” students said, so they taught mainframes to center headings and wrangle footnotes with RUNOFF and GML.

1970s

“Same manual, different tags”

Archivists begged for portable markup, academics sketched DTDs on whiteboards, and SGML slowly took shape.

1980s

Certifying SGML, planting HTML

Once SGML was rubber-stamped, CERN researchers asked, “What if we trim it and add links?” and the HTML memo began to circulate.

1990s

“Let’s read the same HTML”

Working groups hammered out HTML 2.0 and the DOM so teams could promise, “One spec, one script, every browser.”

2000s

Making pages behave like apps

Browser vendors formed WHATWG chanting “HTML needs new inputs,” while meetup crews coined microformats to surface events and people.

2010s

Semantics team up with ARIA

HTML5 went stable, and accessibility experts insisted, “Name your landmarks, declare your roles,” turning structure into shared etiquette.

2020s

Shipping structure as code

Teams promised, “Drop this custom element and the landmarks come with it,” while public design guides spread reusable templates.

Further Reading

Primary specifications and field notes that shaped SGML, HTML, and accessibility best practices.