Revision 614407 of HTML

<h2 id="Summary">Summary</h2>
<p>The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a descriptive language specifically designed to structure web pages.</p>
<h2 id="In_Depth">In Depth</h2>
<h3 id="A_bit_of_history">A bit of history</h3>
<p>In 1990 when Tim Berners-Lee came with it's proposal of what will become the {{Glossary("World Wide Web")}}, he defined the concept of hypertext to browse from one document to another. This concept is formalized between 1991 and 1992 through an Hypertext Markup Language mainly based on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_Language" rel="external">SGML</a>.</p>
<p>In 1993, HTML start to be formally specified by the {{Glossary("IETF")}}. After a few drafts, a formal specification is released in 1995 under the name "HTML 2.0".</p>
<p>In 1996, the {{Glossary("W3C")}} — specifically design to sustain the development of the {{Glossary("World Wide Web","web")}} — took back the work on HTML and publish the "HTML 3.2 Recommendation" a year latter.</p>
<p>HTML 4.0 is released in 1999 and become an ISO standard in 2000. At that time, the work on HTML almost stopped at the {{Glossary("W3C")}} as the various participant to the HTML working group wish to move to an {{GLossary("XML")}} version of HTML called XHTML.</p>
<p>In 2004, a independent group, the {{Glossary("WHATWG","WHAT Working Group")}}, start to work back on HTML to improve it. The work of this group will force the {{Glossary("W3C")}} to resume its work on HTML. In 2008 a first draft of HTML 5.0 is released and the work on the language move on since then.</p>
<h3 id="Concept_and_syntax">Concept and syntax</h3>
<p>An HTML document is a regular text document structured with {{Glossary("tags","tag")}} enclosed in angle bracket (such as <code>&lt;html&gt;</code>). HTML {{Glossary("tags","tag")}} commonly come in pair, enclosing portion of the text such as the <code>&lt;p&gt;</code> and <code>&lt;/p&gt;</code> {{Glossary("tags","tag")}} which define a paragraph of text. The first {{Glossary("tag")}} in a pair is the start tag, and the second tag is the end tag (they are also called opening tags and closing tags). However it exist some "empty" tags that cannot enclose any text such as the <code>&lt;img&gt;</code> tag, which is used to display an image. Those empty tags are called self-closing tags.</p>
<p>HTML {{Glossary("tags","tag")}} can also been extend with {{Glossary("attribute","attributes")}}. {{Glossary("attribute","Attributes")}} provide extra information necessary to the tag to work properly (such as the <code>src</code> {{Glossary("attribute")}} on the <code>&lt;img&gt;</code> tag) or just provide some optional information.</p>
<p><img alt="Detail of the structure of an HTML element" src="https://mdn.mozillademos.org/files/7659/anatomy-of-an-html-element.png" style="width: 609px; height: 181px;" /></p>
<p>An HTML document is usually saved with the .htm or .html extension and is served by a {{Glossary("Server","web server")}}. Any {{Glossary("Browser","web browser")}} is able to read and render an HTML document.</p>
<h2 id="Know_more">Know more</h2>
<h3 id="General_knowledge">General knowledge</h3>
<ul>
 <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML" rel="external">HTML on Wikipedia</a></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="Learning_HTML">Learning HTML</h3>
<ul>
 <li><a href="https://www.codecademy.com/en/tracks/web" rel="external">The web course on codecademy.com</a></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="Technical_reference">Technical reference</h3>
<ul>
 <li><a href="/en-US/docs/Web/HTML">The HTML documentation on MDN</a></li>
 <li><a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/" rel="external">The HTML specification</a></li>
</ul>