HTML
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a set of tags for marking up the content of a web page into distinct sections. As of 2007, the internet is using HTML version 4. For Ajax purposes, it is common to require a more restrictive variety of HTML, called XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language), which guarantees a higher conformity with rules so that, among other reasons, XHTML can be manipulated more successfully by Javascript.
HTML is a W3C standard used for creating World Wide Web pages. HTML conforms to, and is a subset of, Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).
HTML resembles old-fashioned typesetting code, where a block of text is surrounded by tags that indicate how it should appear. HTML allows text to be linked to another file on the Internet, similar to Vannevar Bush's proposed Memory Extender (Memex).
Tim Berners-Lee created the original HTML (and many associated protocols such as HTTP) on a NeXTcube workstation using the NeXTSTEP development environment.
Tags
Like most markup languages, HTML uses tags to convey information.
Current Version
The HTML standard is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (commonly shortened to W3C). The current official version of HTML is 4.01 which was ratified in December 1999. 4.01 is a minor step from 1997's 4.0 standard.
XHTML
HTML has been partially replaced by Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML), which is a reformulation of HTML using Extensible Markup Language (XML). The current version of XHTML is [1], which was released in 2001.
See also
External links
Tutorials and guides
HTML Markup Validators
- W3C's Markup Validator
- WDG HTML Validator
- Validators and checkers (Site Check)
- Off-line HTML Validator v1.0 for Windows
Other specifications
- Web Applications 1.0 A specification generally referred to as "HTML 5". The Web Hypertext Application Technology working group are an independent initiative who cooperate with the W3C.