HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a descriptive language that specifies webpage structure.
Brief history
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.
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.
Concept and syntax
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 (<>
). There are a few empty or void tags that cannot enclose any text, for instance {{htmlelement("img")}}.
You can extend HTML tags with {{Glossary("attribute","attributes")}}, which provide additional information affecting how the browser interprets the element:
An HTML is normally saved with an .htm
or .html
extension, is served by a {{Glossary("Server","web server")}}, and can be rendered by any {{Glossary("Browser","Web browser")}}.
Learn more
General knowledge
- {{interwiki("wikipedia", "HTML", "HTML")}} on Wikipedia