Structured Query Language (SQL) existed even before the WWW. Dr. E. F. Codd originally published the paper, A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks, in June, 1970, in the Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) journal, Communications of the ACM. SQL was initially developed at IBM by Chamberlin and Boyce, in 1974. Relational Software (now Oracle Corporation) was the first to develop a commercially available implementation of SQL, targeted at United States governmental agencies.
The first American National Standards Institute (ANSI) SQL standard came out in 1986. Since then, there have been eight revisions, with the most recent being published in 2016 (SQL:2016).
SQL was not particularly popular at the start of the WWW. Static content could just be hardcoded into the HTML page without much fuss. However, as the functionality of websites...