from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
Hypertext Markup Language
HTML
<hypertext, World-Wide Web, standard> (HTML) A {hypertext}
document format used on the {World-Wide Web}. HTML is built
on top of {SGML}. "Tags" are embedded in the text. A tag
consists of a "<", a "directive" (in lower case), zero or
more parameters and a ">". Matched pairs of directives, like
"<title>" and "</title>" are used to delimit text which is to
appear in a special place or style.
Links to other documents are in the form
<a href="http://machine.edu/subdir/file.html">foo</a>
where "<a>" and "</a>" delimit an "anchor", "href" introduces
a hypertext reference, which is most often a {Uniform Resource
Locator} (URL) (the string in double quotes in the example
above). The link will be represented in the browser by the
text "foo" (typically shown underlined and in a different
colour).
A certain place within an HTML document can be marked with a
named anchor, e.g.:
<a name="baz">
The "fragment identifier", "baz", can be used in an href by
appending "#baz" to the document name.
Other common tags include <p> for a new paragraph, <b>..</b>
for bold text, <ul> for an unnumbered list, <pre> for
preformated text, <h1>, <h2> .. <h6> for headings.
{HTML} supports some standard {SGML} {national characters} and
other non-{ASCII} characters through special {escape
sequences}, e.g. "é" for a lower case 'e' with an acute
accent. You can sometimes get away without the terminating
semicolon but it's bad style.
Most systems will ignore the case of tags and attributes but
lower case should be used for compatibility with {XHTML}.
The {World-Wide Web Consortium} (W3C) is the international
{standards} body for HTML.
Latest version: {XHTML} 1.0, as of 2000-09-10.
(http://w3.org/MarkUp/).
Character escape sequences
(http://w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/ISOlat1.html).
See also {weblint}.
(2006-01-19)