HTML has always been about interconnection. Back in the ancient days, when elec-tronica was cool and not called “house music” and before the Rolling Stones qualified for Medicare, the web was littered with big huge documents. In fact, it was exactly the opposite of today, where most people think enhanced digital books are just electronic wrappers around full-text copies of what’s in print.
In the ’90s, the web was full of 15-page specifications, all in a single file. You scrolled through those massive documents just like you paged through an encyclopedia. Much of the early versions of HTML were intended to deal with this, widely considered a detriment to the readability and usability of the web. That’s largely because Tim Bern-ers-Lee, the recognized father of HTML, was a researcher enabling other researchers
(mostly at CERN at the time). If you’ve ever known anyone mired in research, brevity is rarely their prevailing trait, so reading huge documents online was a necessity, but scrolling through 15- (or 1,500-) page documents just wasn’t a long-term option. WU, FS, FS, HF, MU

So early on, HTML was not primarily about displaying those documents with lots of formatting. Most fundamental to HTML was the simple a tag. It gave a document the means to link to another document. Suddenly 15-page documents were reduced (mer-cifully) to 15 one-page documents, all linked together. Bye bye scrolling; hello useful linking. This is all pretty standard fare, and if much of this is new to you, then the waters are going to get deep quickly.