Revision 811455 of HTML

<p>HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a descriptive language that specifies webpage structure.</p>

<h2 id="Brief_history">Brief history</h2>

<p>In 1990, as part of his vision of the {{glossary("World Wide Web","Web")}}, Tim Berners-Lee defined the concept of {{glossary("hypertext")}}, which Berners-Lee formalized the following year through a markup mainly based on {{glossary("SGML")}}. The {{glossary("IETF")}} began formally specifying HTML in 1993, and after several drafts released version 2.0 in 1995. In 1994 Berners-Lee founded the {{glossary("W3C")}} to develop the Web. In 1996, the W3C took over the HTML work and published the HTML 3.2 Recommendation a year later. HTML 4.0 was released in 1999 and became an {{glossary("ISO")}} standard in 2000.</p>

<p>At that time, the W3C nearly abandoned HTML in favor of {{glossary("XHTML")}}, prompting the founding of an independent group called {{glossary("WHATWG")}} in 2004. Thanks to WHATWG, work on {{glossary("HTML5")}} continued: the two organizations released the first draft in 2008 and the final standard in 2014.</p>

<h2 id="Concept_and_syntax">Concept and syntax</h2>

<p>An HTML document is a plaintext document structured with {{glossary("element","elements")}}. Elements are surrounded by matching opening and closing {{Glossary("tag","tags")}}. Each tag begins and ends with angle brackets (<code>&lt;&gt;</code>). There are a few empty or self-closing tags that cannot enclose any text, for instance {{htmlelement("img")}}.</p>

<p>You can extend HTML tags with {{Glossary("attribute","attributes")}}, which provide additional information affecting how the browser interprets the element:</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="height:181px; width:609px" /></p>

<p>An HTML is normally saved with an <code>.htm</code> or <code>.html</code> extension, is served by a {{Glossary("Server","web server")}}, and can be rendered by any {{Glossary("Browser","Web browser")}}.</p>

<h2 id="Learn_more">Learn more</h2>

<h3 id="General_knowledge">General knowledge</h3>

<ul>
 <li>{{interwiki("wikipedia", "HTML", "HTML")}} on Wikipedia</li>
</ul>

<h3 id="Learning_HTML">Learning HTML</h3>

<ul>
 <li><a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Learn/HTML">our HTML tutorial</a></li>
 <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>