The Hypertext Markup Language was introduced by CERN. Designed as a ``markup'' language derived from SGML, HTML didn't have many layout capabilities and features for graphical design. Many of these features have been added in the mean time, making it also a suitable document format not only for documents that consist of text mainly, but also for fully designed, optically very appealing publications directed toward commercial advertizement.
Efforts have been taken to include not only layout improvements but also support a wider range of documents, such as foreign (non-latin) charsets, and especially mathematical formulas used in scientific publications. Unfortunately, these efforts were only written down in form of a standard, but they are not implemented by any browser commonly used today.