History. The span element was introduced to HTML in the internationalization working group’s second draft html-i18n in 1995. However, it was not until HTML 4.01 that it became part of the HTML language, appearing in the HTML 4 W3C Working Draft in 1997. In 1995, span was introduced to mark up any inline span of text, because ‘a generic container is needed to carry the LANG and BIDI attributes …