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| 2nd | Top file formats |
| 25th | Top computing and IT abbreviations |
| Filename extension | .html, .htm |
|---|---|
| Internet media type | text/html |
| Type code | TEXT |
| Uniform Type Identifier | public.html |
| Developed by | World Wide Web Consortium & WHATWG |
| Type of format | Markup language |
| Extended from | SGML |
| Extended to | XHTML |
| Standard(s) | ISO/IEC 15445 W3C HTML 4.01 W3C HTML 5 (draft) |
HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists etc as well as for links, quotes, and other items. It allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms. It is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of "tags" surrounded by angle brackets within the web page content. It can include or can load scripts in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML processors like Web browsers; and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the appearance and layout of text and other material. The W3C, maintainer of both HTML and CSS standards, encourages the use of CSS over explicit presentational markup.[1]
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In 1980, physicist Tim Berners-Lee, who was a contractor at CERN, proposed and prototyped ENQUIRE, a system for CERN researchers to use and share documents. In 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a memo proposing an Internet-based hypertext system.[2] Berners-Lee specified HTML and wrote the browser and server software in the last part of 1990. In that year, Berners-Lee and CERN data systems engineer Robert Cailliau collaborated on a joint request for funding, but the project was not formally adopted by CERN. In his personal notes,[3] from 1990 he lists[4] "some of the many areas in which hypertext is used", and puts an encyclopedia first .
The first publicly available description of HTML was a document called HTML Tags, first mentioned on the Internet by Berners-Lee in late 1991.[5][6] It describes 20 elements comprising the initial, relatively simple design of HTML. Except for the hyperlink tag, these were strongly influenced by SGMLguid, an in-house SGML based documentation format at CERN. Thirteen of these elements still exist in HTML 4.[7]
HTML is a text and image formatting language used by web browsers to dynamically format web pages. Many of the text elements are found in the 1988 ISO technical report TR 9537 Techniques for using SGML, which in turn covers the features of early text formatting languages such as that used by the RUNOFF command developed in the early 1960s for the CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System) operating system: these formatting commands were derived from the commands used by typesetters to manually format documents. However the SGML concept of generalized markup is based on elements (nested annotated ranges with attributes) rather than merely point effects, and also the separation of structure and processing: HTML has been progressively moved in this direction with CSS.
Berners-Lee considered HTML to be an application of SGML, and it was formally defined as such by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) with the mid-1993 publication of the first proposal for an HTML specification: "Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)" Internet-Draft by Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly, which included an SGML Document Type Definition to define the grammar.[8] The draft expired after six months, but was notable for its acknowledgment of the NCSA Mosaic browser's custom tag for embedding in-line images, reflecting the IETF's philosophy of basing standards on successful prototypes.[9] Similarly, Dave Raggett's competing Internet-Draft, "HTML+ (Hypertext Markup Format)", from late 1993, suggested standardizing already-implemented features like tables and fill-out forms.[10]
After the HTML and HTML+ drafts expired in early 1994, the IETF created an HTML Working Group, which in 1995 completed "HTML 2.0", the first HTML specification intended to be treated as a standard against which future implementations should be based.[9] Published as Request for Comments 1866, HTML 2.0 included ideas from the HTML and HTML+ drafts.[11] The 2.0 designation was intended to distinguish the new edition from previous drafts.[12]
Further development under the auspices of the IETF was stalled by competing interests. Since 1996, the HTML specifications have been maintained, with input from commercial software vendors, by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).[13] However, in 2000, HTML also became an international standard (ISO/IEC 15445:2000). The last HTML specification published by the W3C is the HTML 4.01 Recommendation, published in late 1999. Its issues and errors were last acknowledged by errata published in 2001.
XHTML is a separate language that began as a reformulation of HTML 4.01 using XML 1.0. It continues to be developed:
HTML markup consists of several key components, including elements (and their attributes), character-based data types, and character references and entity references. Another important component is the document type declaration, which specifies the Document Type Definition. As of HTML 5, no Document Type Definition will need to be specified, and will only determine the layout mode [4].
The Hello world program, a common computer program employed for comparing programming languages, scripting languages, and markup languages is made of 9 lines of code in HTML, albeit Newlines are optional:
<!doctype html> <html> <head> <title>Hello HTML</title> </head> <body> <p>Hello World!</p> </body> </html>
This Document Type Declaration is for HTML 5.
If the <!doctype html> declaration is not included, most browsers will render using "quirks mode."[33]
HTML documents are composed entirely of HTML elements that, in their most general form have three components: a pair of element tags with a "start tag" and "end tag"; some element attributes given to the element within the tags; and finally, all the actual, textual and graphical, information content that will be rendered on the display. An HTML element is everything between and including the tags. A tag is a keyword enclosed in angle brackets.
A common form of an HTML element is:
Search
<tag>content to be rendered</tag>
The name of the HTML element is also the name of the tag. Note that the end tag's name starts with a slash character, "/".
The most general form of an HTML element is:
<tag attribute1="value1" attribute2="value2">content to be rendered</tag>
By not assigning attributes most start tags default their attribute values.
There are some basic types of tags: Heading of the HTML:<head>...</head>. Usually the title should be included in the head, for example:
<head> <title>The title</title> </head>
Paragraph Partition:
<p>Paragraph 1</p> <p>Paragraph 2</p>
Newline:<br>. The difference between <br> and <p> is that 'br' breaks a line without altering the semantic structure of the page, whereas 'p' sections the page into paragraphs. Here is an example:
<code><p>This <br> is a paragraph <br> with <br> line breaks</p></code>
Annotation:
<!--..Explain!..-->
Annotations can help to understand the coding and do not display in the webpage.
There are several types of markup elements used in HTML.
<h2>Golf</h2> establishes "Golf" as a second-level heading, which would be rendered in a browser in a manner similar to the "HTML markup" title at the start of this section. Structural markup does not denote any specific rendering, but most Web browsers have standardized default styles for element formatting. Text may be further styled with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).<b>boldface</b> indicates that visual output devices should render "boldface" in bold text, but gives no indication what devices which are unable to do this (such as aural devices that read the text aloud) should do. In the case of both <b>bold</b> and <i>italic</i>, there are elements which usually have an equivalent visual rendering but are more semantic in nature, namely <strong>strong emphasis</strong> and <em>emphasis</em> respectively. It is easier to see how an aural user agent should interpret the latter two elements. However, they are not equivalent to their presentational counterparts: it would be undesirable for a screen-reader to emphasize the name of a book, for instance, but on a screen such a name would be italicized. Most presentational markup elements have become deprecated under the HTML 4.0 specification, in favor of CSS based style design.<a>Wikipedia</a>. In addition, the href attribute must be set to a valid URL. For example, the HTML markup, <a href="">Wikipedia</a>, will render the word "Wikipedia" as a hyperlink. An example to render an image as a hyperlink is: <a href="http://example.org"><img src="image.gif" alt="alternative text" width="50" height="50"></a>.Most of the attributes of an element are name-value pairs, separated by "=", and written within the start tag of an element, after the element's name. The value may be enclosed in single or double quotes, although values consisting of certain characters can be left unquoted in HTML (but not XHTML).[34][35] Leaving attribute values unquoted is considered unsafe.[36] In contrast with name-value pair attributes, there are some attributes that affect the element simply by their presence in the start tag of the element[5] (like the ismap attribute for the img element[37]).
Most elements can take any of several common attributes:
id attribute provides a document-wide unique identifier for an element. This can be used by stylesheets to provide presentational properties, by browsers to focus attention on the specific element, or by scripts to alter the contents or presentation of an element. Appended to the URL of the page, it provides a globally-unique identifier for an element; typically a sub-section of the page. For example, the ID "Attributes" in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Attributesclass attribute provides a way of classifying similar elements. This can be used for semantic or presentation purposes. Semantically, for example, classes are used in microformats. Presentationally, for example, an HTML document might use the designation class="notation" to indicate that all elements with this class value are subordinate to the main text of the document. Such elements might be gathered together and presented as footnotes on a page instead of appearing in the place where they occur in the HTML source.style non-attributal codes presentational properties to a particular element. It is considered better practice to use an element’s id or class attributes to select the element with a stylesheet, though sometimes this can be too cumbersome for a simple and specific or ad hoc application of styled properties.title attribute is used to attach subtextual explanation to an element. In most browsers this attribute is displayed as what is often referred to as a tooltip.The abbreviation element, abbr, can be used to demonstrate these various attributes:
<abbr id="anId" class="aClass" style="color:blue;" title="Hypertext Markup Language">HTML</abbr>
This example displays as HTML; in most browsers, pointing the cursor at the abbreviation should display the title text "Hypertext Markup Language."
Most elements also take the language-related attributes lang and dir.
As of version 4.0, HTML defines a set of 252 character entity references and a set of 1,114,050 numeric character references, both of which allow individual characters to be written via simple markup, rather than literally. A literal character and its markup counterpart are considered equivalent and are rendered identically.
The ability to "escape" characters in this way allows for the characters < and & (when written as < and &, respectively) to be interpreted as character data, rather than markup. For example, a literal < normally indicates the start of a tag, and & normally indicates the start of a character entity reference or numeric character reference; writing it as & or & or & allows & to be included in the content of elements or the values of attributes. The double-quote character ("), when used to quote an attribute value, must also be escaped as " or " or " when it appears within the attribute value itself. The single-quote character ('), when used to quote an attribute value, must also be escaped as ' or ' (should NOT be escaped as ' except in XHTML documents) when it appears within the attribute value itself. However, since document authors often overlook the need to escape these characters, browsers tend to be very forgiving, treating them as markup only when subsequent text appears to confirm that intent.
Escaping also allows for characters that are not easily typed or that aren't even available in the document's character encoding to be represented within the element and attribute content. For example, the acute-accented e (é), a character typically found only on Western European keyboards, can be written in any HTML document as the entity reference é or as the numeric references é or é. The characters comprising those references (that is, the &, the ;, the letters in eacute, and so on) are available on all keyboards and are supported in all character encodings, whereas the literal é is not.
HTML defines several data types for element content, such as script data and stylesheet data, and a plethora of types for attribute values, including IDs, names, URIs, numbers, units of length, languages, media descriptors, colors, character encodings, dates and times, and so on. All of these data types are specializations of character data.
HTML documents are required to start with a Document Type Declaration (informally, a "doctype"). In browsers, the function of the doctype is to indicate the rendering mode—particularly to avoid quirks mode.
The original purpose of the doctype was to enable parsing and validation of HTML documents by SGML tools based on the Document Type Definition (DTD). The DTD to which the DOCTYPE refers contains machine-readable grammar specifying the permitted and prohibited content for a document conforming to such a DTD. Browsers, on the other hand, do not implement HTML as an application of SGML and by consequence do not read the DTD. HTML 5 does not define a DTD, because of the technology's inherent limitations, so in HTML 5 the doctype declaration, <!doctype html>, does not refer to a DTD.
An example of an HTML 4 doctype is
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
This declaration references the DTD for the Strict version of HTML 4.01, which does not include presentational elements like font, leaving formatting to Cascading Style Sheets and the span and div element. SGML-based validators read the DTD in order to properly parse the document and to perform validation. In modern browsers, this doctype activates standards mode as opposed to quirks mode.
In addition, HTML 4.01 provides Transitional and Frameset DTDs, as explained below.
Semantic HTML is a way of writing HTML that emphasizes the meaning of the encoded information over its presentation (look). HTML has included semantic markup from its inception,[38] but has also included presentational markup such as <font>, <i> and <center> tags. There are also the semantically neutral span and div tags. Since the late 1990s when Cascading Style Sheets were beginning to work in most browsers, web authors have been encouraged to avoid the use of presentational HTML markup with a view to the separation of presentation and content.[39]
In a 2001 discussion of the Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee and others gave examples of ways in which intelligent software 'agents' may one day automatically trawl the Web and find, filter and correlate previously unrelated, published facts for the benefit of human users.[40] Such agents are not commonplace even now, but some of the ideas of Web 2.0, mashups and price comparison websites may be coming close. The main difference between these web application hybrids and Berners-Lee's semantic agents lies in the fact that the current aggregation and hybridisation of information is usually designed in by web developers, who already know the web locations and the API semantics of the specific data they wish to mash, compare and combine.
An important type of web agent that does trawl and read web pages automatically, without prior knowledge of what it might find, is the Web crawler or search-engine spider. These software agents are dependent on the semantic clarity of web pages they find as they use various techniques and algorithms to read and index millions of web pages a day and provide web users with search facilities without which the World Wide Web would be only a fraction of its current usefulness.
In order for search-engine spiders to be able to rate the significance of pieces of text they find in HTML documents, and also for those creating mashups and other hybrids, as well as for more automated agents as they are developed, the semantic structures that exist in HTML need to be widely and uniformly applied to bring out the meaning of published text.[41]
Presentational markup tags are deprecated in current HTML and XHTML recommendations and are illegal in HTML 5.
Good semantic HTML also improves the accessibility of web documents (see also Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). For example, when a screen reader or audio browser can correctly ascertain the structure of a document, it will not waste the visually impaired user's time by reading out repeated or irrelevant information when it has been marked up correctly.
HTML documents can be delivered by the same means as any other computer file; however, they are most often delivered either by HTTP from a Web server or by e-mail.
The World Wide Web is composed primarily of HTML documents transmitted from Web servers to Web browsers using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). However, HTTP is used to serve images, sound, and other content in addition to HTML. To allow the Web browser to know how to handle each document it receives, other information is transmitted along with the document. This meta data usually includes the MIME type (e.g. text/html or application/xhtml+xml) and the character encoding (see Character encoding in HTML).
In modern browsers, the MIME type that is sent with the HTML document may affect how the document is initially interpreted. A document sent with the XHTML MIME type is expected to be well-formed XML, and syntax errors may cause the browser to fail to render it. The same document sent with the HTML MIME type might be displayed successfully, since some browsers are more lenient with HTML.
The W3C recommendations state that XHTML 1.0 documents that follow guidelines set forth in the recommendation's Appendix C may be labeled with either MIME Type.[42] The current XHTML 1.1 Working Draft also states that XHTML 1.1 documents should[43] be labeled with either MIME type.[44]
Most graphical e-mail clients allow the use of a subset of HTML (often ill-defined) to provide formatting and semantic markup not available with plain text. This may include typographic information like coloured headings, emphasized and quoted text, inline images and diagrams. Many such clients include both a GUI editor for composing HTML e-mail messages and a rendering engine for displaying them. Use of HTML in e-mail is controversial because of compatibility issues, because it can help disguise phishing attacks, because it can confuse spam filters and because the message size is larger than plain text.
The most common filename extension for files containing HTML is .html. A common abbreviation of this is .htm, which originated because some early operating systems and file systems, such as DOS and FAT, limited file extensions to three letters.
An HTML Application (HTA; file extension ".hta") is a Microsoft Windows application that uses HTML and Dynamic HTML in a browser to provide the application's graphical interface. A regular HTML file is confined to the security model of the web browser, communicating only to web servers and manipulating only webpage objects and site cookies. An HTA runs as a fully trusted application and therefore has more privileges, like creation/editing/removal of files and Windows Registry entries. Because they operate outside the browser's security model, HTAs cannot be executed via HTTP, but must be downloaded (just like an EXE file) and executed from local file system.
Since its inception, HTML and its associated protocols gained acceptance relatively quickly. However, no clear standards existed in the early years of the language. Though its creators originally conceived of HTML as a semantic language devoid of presentation details[5], practical uses pushed many presentational elements and attributes into the language, driven largely by the various browser vendors. The latest standards surrounding HTML reflect efforts to overcome the sometimes chaotic development of the language[6] and to create a rational foundation for building both meaningful and well-presented documents. To return HTML to its role as a semantic language, the W3C has developed style languages such as CSS and XSL to shoulder the burden of presentation. In conjunction, the HTML specification has slowly reined in the presentational elements.
There are two axes differentiating various variations of HTML as currently specified: SGML-based HTML versus XML-based HTML (referred to as XHTML) on one axis, and strict versus transitional (loose) versus frameset on the other axis.
One difference in the latest HTML specifications lies in the distinction between the SGML-based specification and the XML-based specification. The XML-based specification is usually called XHTML to distinguish it clearly from the more traditional definition; however, the root element name continues to be 'html' even in the XHTML-specified HTML. The W3C intended XHTML 1.0 to be identical to HTML 4.01 except where limitations of XML over the more complex SGML require workarounds. Because XHTML and HTML are closely related, they are sometimes documented in parallel. In such circumstances, some authors conflate the two names as (X)HTML or X(HTML).[45]
Like HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 has three sub-specifications: strict, loose, and frameset.
Aside from the different opening declarations for a document, the differences between an HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 document—in each of the corresponding DTDs—are largely syntactic. The underlying syntax of HTML allows many shortcuts that XHTML does not, such as elements with optional opening or closing tags, and even EMPTY elements which must not have an end tag. By contrast, XHTML requires all elements to have an opening tag or a closing tag. XHTML, however, also introduces a new shortcut: an XHTML tag may be opened and closed within the same tag, by including a slash before the end of the tag like this: <br/>. The introduction of this shorthand, which is not used in the SGML declaration for HTML 4.01, may confuse earlier software unfamiliar with this new convention. A fix for this is to include a space before closing the tag, as such: <br />.[46]
To understand the subtle differences between HTML and XHTML, consider the transformation of a valid and well-formed XHTML 1.0 document that adheres to Appendix C (see below) into a valid HTML 4.01 document. To make this translation requires the following steps:
lang attribute rather than the XHTML xml:lang attribute. XHTML uses XML's built in language-defining functionality attribute.xmlns=URI). HTML has no facilities for namespaces.<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>).text/html. For both HTML and XHTML, this comes from the HTTP Content-Type header sent by the server.<br/> to <br>).Those are the main changes necessary to translate a document from XHTML 1.0 to HTML 4.01. To translate from HTML to XHTML would also require the addition of any omitted opening or closing tags. Whether coding in HTML or XHTML it may just be best to always include the optional tags within an HTML document rather than remembering which tags can be omitted.
A well-formed XHTML document adheres to all the syntax requirements of XML. A valid document adheres to the content specification for XHTML, which describes the document structure.
The W3C recommends several conventions to ensure an easy migration between HTML and XHTML (see HTML Compatibility Guidelines). The following steps can be applied to XHTML 1.0 documents only:
xml:lang and lang attributes on any elements assigning language.<br /> instead of <br/>.<div></div>, not <div />).By carefully following the W3C’s compatibility guidelines, a user agent should be able to interpret the document equally as HTML or XHTML. For documents that are XHTML 1.0 and have been made compatible in this way, the W3C permits them to be served either as HTML (with a text/html MIME type), or as XHTML (with an application/xhtml+xml or application/xml MIME type). When delivered as XHTML, browsers should use an XML parser, which adheres strictly to the XML specifications for parsing the document's contents.
HTML 4 defined three different versions of the language: Strict, Transitional (once called Loose), and Frameset. The Strict version is intended for new documents and is considered best practice, while the Transitional and Frameset versions were developed to make it easier to transition documents that conformed to older HTML specification or didn't conform to any specification to a version of HTML 4. The Transitional and Frameset versions allow for presentational markup, which is omitted in the Strict version. Instead, cascading style sheets are encouraged to improve the presentation of HTML documents.
Because XHTML 1 only defines an XML syntax for the language defined by HTML 4, the same differences apply to XHTML 1 as well.
The Transitional version allows the following parts of the vocabulary, which are not included in the Strict version:
body, blockquote, form, noscript and noframesu)s)centerfontbasefontbackground and bgcolor attributes for body element.align attribute on div, form, paragraph (p), and heading (h1...h6) elementsalign, noshade, size, and width attributes on hr elementalign, border, vspace, and hspace attributes on img and object elementsalign attribute on legend and caption elementsalign and bgcolor on table elementnowrap, bgcolor, width, height on td and th elementsbgcolor attribute on tr elementclear attribute on br elementcompact attribute on dl, dir and menu elementstype, compact, and start attributes on ol and ul elementstype and value attributes on li elementwidth attribute on pre elementmenu list (no substitute, though unordered list is recommended)dir list (no substitute, though unordered list is recommended)isindex (element requires server-side support and is typically added to documents server-side, form and input elements can be used as a substitute)applet (deprecated in favor of object element)language attribute on script element (redundant with the type attribute).iframenoframestarget attribute on anchor, client-side image-map (imagemap), link, form, and base elementsThe Frameset version includes everything in the Transitional version, as well as the frameset element (used instead of body) and the frame element.
In addition to the above transitional differences, the frameset specifications (whether XHTML 1.0 or HTML 4.01) specifies a different content model, with frameset replacing body, containing frame elements, and optionally noframes, with a body.
As this list demonstrates, the loose versions of the specification are maintained for legacy support. However, contrary to popular misconceptions, the move to XHTML does not imply a removal of this legacy support. Rather the X in XML stands for extensible and the W3C is modularizing the entire specification and opening it up to independent extensions. The primary achievement in the move from XHTML 1.0 to XHTML 1.1 is the modularization of the entire specification. The strict version of HTML is deployed in XHTML 1.1 through a set of modular extensions to the base XHTML 1.1 specification. Likewise someone looking for the loose (transitional) or frameset specifications will find similar extended XHTML 1.1 support (much of it is contained in the legacy or frame modules). The modularization also allows for separate features to develop on their own timetable. So for example XHTML 1.1 will allow quicker migration to emerging XML standards such as MathML (a presentational and semantic math language based on XML) and XForms—a new highly advanced web-form technology to replace the existing HTML forms.
In summary, the HTML 4.01 specification primarily reined in all the various HTML implementations into a single clear written specification based on SGML. XHTML 1.0, ported this specification, as is, to the new XML defined specification. Next, XHTML 1.1 takes advantage of the extensible nature of XML and modularizes the whole specification. XHTML 2.0 will be the first step in adding new features to the specification in a standards-body-based approach.
HTML lacks some of the features found in earlier hypertext systems, such as typed links, source tracking, fat links, and more.[47] Even some hypertext features that were in early versions of HTML have been ignored by most popular web browsers until recently, such as the link element and in-browser Web page editing.
Sometimes Web services or browser manufacturers remedy these shortcomings. For instance, wikis and content management systems allow surfers to edit the Web pages they visit.
There are some WYSIWYG editors in which the user lays out everything as it is to appear in the HTML document using a graphical user interface, and the editor renders this as an HTML document, no longer requiring the author to have extensive knowledge of HTML.
Web page editing is clearly dominated by the WYSIWYG editing model. But, this model has been criticized,[48][49] primarily because of the low quality of the generated code, and there are voices advocating a change to the WYSIWYM model.
WYSIWYG editors remains a controversial topic because of their perceived flaws such as:
Nevertheless, since WYSIWYG editors offer convenience over hand-coded pages as well as not requiring the author to know the finer details of HTML, they still dominate web authoring.
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Educational level: this is a non-formal education resource. |
HTML or HyperText Markup Language is a predominant markup language for web pages. It is a structured way of telling web browsers how a web page should be displayed. HTML is a static language, which means that it cannot process (or change its content based on) user input.
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Freakandy I want to learn something new, and think HTML is quite an interesting subject!
Cheekybrew 00:11, 9 January 2009 (UTC)cheekybrew/i just have a newly discovered insatiable desire for web design knowledge!
Benson79 04/01/2010 Changing career, got to start somewhere
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HTML
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This is a guide to HTML, the markup language of the internet. This book is about HTML, not about how to make it dynamic — for that, see JavaScript. Cascading Style Sheets, a way of styling the HTML markup, and are covered only briefly in this book.
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Cascading Style Sheets |
In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser. HTML is used to structure information -- denoting certain text as headings, paragraphs, lists and so on -- and can be used to define the semantics of a document.
Originally defined by Tim Berners Lee and further developed by the IETF with a simplified SGML syntax, HTML is now an international standard (ISO/IEC 15445:2000). The HTML specification is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
In terms of file extensions, HTML documents are frequently named ".HTM", a shortened version implemented in order to get the documents to display properly on DOS/Windows 3.1 systems. This variant conforms with the 8.3 limit on file naming which was a result of the File Allocation Table file system. While unnecessary for modern versions of Windows, the shortened form remains common by convention.
Early versions of HTML were defined with looser syntactical rules which helped its adoption by those unfamiliar with web publishing. Web browsers commonly made assumptions about intent and proceeded with rendering of the page. Over time, the trend in the official standards has been to create an increasingly strict language syntax; however, browsers still continue to render pages that are far from valid HTML. HTML 4.01 is the current version of the HTML specification, although the W3C is moving toward replacing it with XHTML, which applies the stricter rules of XML to HTML.
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HTML is a form of markup that is oriented toward the construction of single-page text documents with specialized rendering software called HTML user agents, the most common example of which is a web browser. HTML provides a means by which the document's content can be annotated with various kinds of metadata and rendering hints. The rendering cues may range from minor text decorations, such as specifying that a certain word be underlined or that an image be inserted, to sophisticated imagemaps and form definitions. The metadata may include information about the document's title and author, structural information such as headings, paragraphs, lists, and information that allows the document to be linked to other documents to form a hypertext web.
HTML is a text based format that is designed to be both readable and editable by humans using a text editor. However, writing and updating a large number of pages by hand in this way is time consuming, requires a good knowledge of HTML and can make consistency difficult to maintain. Visual HTML editors such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive or Microsoft FrontPage allow the creation of web pages to be treated much like word processor documents. However, the code generated by these programs is frequently of poor quality.
HTML can be generated on the fly using a server-side scripting system such as PHP, JSP or ASP. Many web applications like content management systems, wikis and web forums generate HTML pages.
HTML is also used in email. Many email clients include a GUI HTML editor for composing emails and a rendering engine for displaying them once received. Use of HTML in email is quite controversial, because of a variety of issues. The most obvious issue is size: an email with lots of formatting will be much larger than the plain text equivalent. This issue is intensified by the fact that for compatibility most clients send a plaintext version as well. Other issues are overuse of formatting (there was at one stage a craze for making letterheads using HTML and sending them as part of every e-mail) and the potential security issues of rendering a complex format like HTML. For these reasons many mailing lists deliberately block HTML email either stripping out the HTML part to just leave the plain text part or rejecting the entire message.
There is no official standard HTML 1.0 specification because there were multiple informal HTML standards at the time. However, some people consider the initial edition provided by Tim Berners-Lee to be the definitive HTML 1.0. That version did not include an IMG tag. Work on a successor for HTML, then called 'HTML+', began in late 1993, designed originally to be "A superset of HTML … which will allow a gradual rollover from the previous format of HTML". The first formal specification was therefore given the version number 2.0 in order to distinguish it from these unofficial "standards". Work on HTML+ continued, but this never became a standard.
The HTML 3.0 standard was proposed by the newly formed W3C in March 1995, and provided many new capabilities such as support for tables, text flow around figures and the display of complex math elements. Even though it was designed to be compatible with HTML 2.0, it was too complex at the time to be implemented, and when the draft expired in September 1995 work in this direction was discontinued due to lack of browser support. HTML 3.1 was never officially proposed, and the next standard proposal was HTML 3.2 (code-named 'Wilbur'), which dropped the majority of the new features in HTML 3.0 and instead adopted many browser-specific elements and attributes which had been created for the Netscape and Mosaic web browsers. Support for math as proposed by HTML 3.0 finally came about years later with a different standard, MathML.
HTML 4.0 likewise adopted many browser-specific elements and attributes, but at the same time began to try to 'clean up' the standard by marking some of them as deprecated, and suggesting they not be used.
Minor editorial revisions to the HTML 4.0 specification were published as HTML 4.01. Since the advent of XHTML, there will not be any more new versions of HTML. The most common extension for HTML is '.html', but previous operating systems limited file extensions to three letters, so a '.htm' extension was also once used, and is less common now but is still interpreted the same and works with most browsers.
Below are the kinds of markup elements in HTML.
<h2>Golf</h2><b>boldface</b><a href="http://wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a>In order to specify which version of the HTML standard they conform to, all HTML documents should start with a Document Type Declaration (informally, a "DOCTYPE"), which makes reference to a Document Type Definition (DTD). For example:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">This declaration asserts that the document conforms to the Strict DTD of HTML 4.01, which is purely structural, leaving formatting to Cascading Style Sheets. In some cases, the presence or absence of an appropriate DTD may influence how a web browser will display the page.
In addition to the Strict DTD, HTML 4.01 provides Transitional and Frameset DTDs. The Transitional DTD was intended to gradually phase in the changes made in the Strict DTD, while the Frameset DTD was intended for those documents which contained frames.
Efforts of the web development community have led to a new thinking in the way a web document should be written; XHTML epitomizes this effort. Standards stress using markup which suggests the structure of the document, like headings, paragraphs, block quoted text, and tables, instead of using markup which is written for visual purposes only, like <font>, <b> (bold), and <i> (italics). Some of these elements are not permitted in certain varieties of HTML, like HTML 4.01 Strict. CSS provides a way to separate the HTML structure from the content's presentation, by keeping all code dealing with presentation defined in a CSS file. See separation of style and content.
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| HTML (HyperText Markup Language) | |
|---|---|
| File extension: | .html, .htm |
| MIME type: | text/html |
| Type code: | TEXT |
| Uniform Type Identifier: | public.html |
| Developed by: | World Wide Web Consortium & WHATWG |
| Type of format: | Markup language |
| Extended from: | SGML |
| Extended to: | XHTML |
| Standard(s): | ISO/IEC 15445 W3C HTML 4.01 W3C HTML 5 (draft) |
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language for creating webpages. Webpages are usually viewed in a web browser. They can include writing, links, pictures, and even sound and video. HTML is used to mark and describe each of these kinds of content so the web browser can show them right.
HTML can also be used to add meta information to a webpage. This is information about the web page. For example, the name of the person who made it. Meta information is not usually shown by web browsers.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript can be included in HTML code. CSS is used to change how a webpage looks. JavaScript is used to add features to webpages and make them more interactive.
HTML was made by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). There are multiple versions of HTML. The current standard is HTML 4.01. That means it is the version the W3C recommends people use. A newer version, called HTML5, is expected to be made the standard within the next few years. The W3C also develops XHTML. This is another markup language which is very similar to HTML, but more strict.
Contents |
HTML uses special bits of programming language called "tags" to let the browser know how a webpage should look. The tags usually come in pairs: an opening tag to tell the browser when to start doing something, and an ending tag to tell the browser when to stop doing something. There are many different kinds of tags, and each one has a different purpose.
Opening tags have a keyword, such as "p," surrounded by angle brackets (< and >). For example, the tag tells the browser the start a new paragraph. Ending tags look almost exactly the same, only they have a forward slash (/) added just before the keyword. For example, the tag
has more on the topic of
Some tags only work in certain browsers. For example, the tag, which is used to make a bit of writing slide across the page, only works in the Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox browsers. Other browsers simply ignore this tag and display the writing normally. Many web page creators avoid using these "non-standard" tags because they want their pages to look the same with all browsers.
Here is an example page in HTML:
This is the title of the page.
This is a paragraph.
The W3C is making a new version of HTML, called HTML5, with more features and better support for things like online video. HTML5 is expected to become the standard version of HTML within the next few years.
Some of the new features in HTML5 are:
In addition, some features of HTML4 have been left out of HTML5. For example, the tag, which is used to change how text looks on a page, is not available in HTML5. The W3C recommends doing this with CSS instead.
Currently, no browsers completely support all of HTML5's new features. However, some of the features are supported by Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari.
| Tag name | What it does | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Creates active links to other web pages | text to display
|
| creates bold text | bold text
Also accepts |
   | HTML 4.01 - HTML 4.01 Specification |
| | HTML 3.2 - HTML 3.2 Reference Specification |
| | HTML 4.0 - HTML 4.0 Specification |
 | ISO/IEC 15445:2000 - ISO/IEC 15445:2000(E) ISO-HTML |
| | XHTML 1.0 - XHTML 1.0: The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition) |
| | Hypertext Markup Language (First Version) - A sample HTML instance |
| | XHTML 2.0 - XHTML™ 2.0 |
| | Reviving Advanced Hypertext - Reviving Advanced Hypertext (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) |
| | HTML Code Tutorial - HTML Code Tutorial - Free Reference Guide for Help with HTML Tags Including Form, Frames, Tables, and more! |
| | Off-line HTML Validator v1.0 - kzone - Download - Projects |
| | Modularization of XHTML - XHTML™ Modularization 1.1 |
| | www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/qattr.html - Recommendation: attribute values should always be quoted in HTML |
| | HTML.net - Introduction | Free HTML Tutorial | HTML.net |
| | specification - HTML 4.01 Specification |
| | World Wide Web Consortium - World Wide Web Consortium - Web Standards |
| | HTML 2.0 - RFC 1866 - Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0 |
| | First mention of HTML Tags on the www-talk mailing list - www-talk from September to October 1991: Re: status. Re: X11 BROWSER for WWW |
| | HTML Dog - HTML and CSS Tutorials, References, and Articles | HTML Dog |
| | Re: SGML/HTML docs, X Browser (archived www-talk mailing list post) - www-talk from November to December 1991: Re: SGML/HTML docs, X Browser |
| | HTML+ Internet-Draft - Abstract - Internet Draft Database Index - draft-raggett-www-html |
| | The Art of Unix Programming - The Art of Unix Programming |
| | Extensions to HTML 3.0 - AOL.com - Netscape |
| | Learn HTML: HTML Tutorials - Webmonkey: the Web Developers Resource |
| | Dave's HTML Code Guide - Dave's Site / davesite.com |
| | HTML/XHTML Validator Project on SourceForge - Cryptography, Law and Privacy Blog: Full Disk Encryption Survey |
| | HTML Goodies - HTML Tutorials, Primers, Web Development Tips and Tricks from HTMLGoodies |
| | W3schools HTML tutorial/reference - W3Schools Online Web Tutorials |
| | Empty elements in SGML, HTML, XML, and XHTML - Empty elements in SGML, HTML, XML, and XHTML |
| | ISO/IEC 15445:2000 - ISO/IEC 15445:2000(E) ISO-HTML |
| | HTML Dog - HTML Beginner Tutorial | HTML Dog |
| | HTML Tree - HTMLTree - A Growing Repository for Web Designers and Developers |
| | link title - Example Web Page |
| | Google web search using terms 'site:w3.org HTML "Rescinded Recommendation"' - site:w3.org HTML "Rescinded Recommendation" - Google Search |
| | NCSA's Beginner's Guide to HTML - NCSA's "A Beginner's Guide to HTML" bounce page |
| | Accessibility Validator - Section 508 web accessibility checkers |
| | Validome Validator - HTML / XHTML / XML / WML Validator |
| | Multipage Validator - Multipage Validator for an xHTML site validation |
| | Webmonkey: The Web Developer's Resource - Webmonkey: the Web Developers Resource |
| | The "Head" Part of an HTML Document - The Head Section of an HTML Document @ OWDC - LESSON 1-11 |
| | gotAPI: Quick HTML Lookup Service - gotAPI/HTML - Instant search in HTML and other developer documentation |
| | 10 Layout Rules.com - 10-layout-rules.com |
| | hints in german - html-sammlung.de |
| | this page always exists in an German Version - 10-webdesign-regeln.de |
| | The Visual QuickStart Guide to HTML - Cookwood Press - Elizabeth Castro - HTML Books |
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