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HTML
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for creating web pages, that is, information presented on the World Wide Web. Defined as a simple "application" of SGML, which is used by organizations with complex publishing requirements, HTML is now an Internet standard maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The most recent version is HTML 4.01.
Introduction
HTML generally appears in text files stored on computers connected to the World Wide Web. These files contain markup, that is, instructions for the program on how to display or process the text in plain text format. HTML may be displayed by a visual web browser, aural browser (one that reads the text of the page to the user), braille reader (converts pages to a braille format), email client, or a wireless device like a cellular phone.
Markup
There are four kinds of markup elements in HTML:
- structural markup that describes the purpose of text (for example,
<h1>Golf</h1> will cause a reader to treat "Golf" as a first-level heading),
- presentational markup that describes the visual appearance of text regardless of its function (for example,
<b>boldface</b> will render boldface text) (Note that presentation markup is deprecated and is not recommended; authors should use CSS for presentation),
- hypertext markup that links parts of the document to other documents (for example,
<a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a> will render the word Wikipedia as a hyperlink to the specified URI), and
- widget elements that create objects (for example, buttons and lists).
Separation of Content and Style
Recent efforts of the web development community have lead to a new thinking in the way a web document should be written; XHTML epitomizes this effort. Standards now 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 , (bold), and (italics). Such presentational code has been removed from the HTML 4.01 Strict and XHTML specifications in favor of CSS solutions. CSS provides a way to seperate the HTML structure from the content's presentation.
Version history of the standard
There is no official HTML 1.0 specification because there were multiple informal HTML standards at the time. Work on a successor for HTML, then called 'HTML +', began in late 1993, designed originally to be "A superset of HTML … [which] allows a gradual rollover from the previous format [HTML]" (Dave Raggett, September 1993).
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 it was not continued due to lack of browser support.
HTML 3.1 was never officially proposed, and the next standard proposal was HTML 3.2, which had dropped the majority of the new features in HTML 3.0 and had instead adopted many browser-specific tags which had been created for the Netscape and Mosaic web browsers.
Support for math as proposed by HTML 3.0 finally came with the different standard MathML.
HTML 4.0 likewise adopted many browser-specific tags, but at the same time began to try and 'clean up' the standard, by marking some tags as 'deprecated'.
There will no longer be any new versions of HTML. However, HTML lives on in XHTML, which is based on XML.
See also
External Links
Referenced By
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