HTML is the standard markup language used to create web pages. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 and includes elements like <head>, <body>, <p>, and <img> to structure and layout web page content. HTML has gone through several versions over the years to support new technologies and is now at version 5, which introduced new semantic elements and embedded media with <video> and <audio> tags. HTML pages are built with tags that do not display but tell browsers how to render content, and attributes provide additional information about elements.