Hypertext Markup Language
<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" (case insensitive), 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.
The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the international standards body for HTML.
Latest version:
XHTML 1.0, as of 2000-09-10.
Home (http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/).
Character escape sequences (http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/ISOlat1.html).
See also
weblint.
