HyperText Markup Language
| HTML | |
|---|---|
| The HTML5 logo | |
| Filename extensions | .html, .htm |
| Internet media type | text/html |
| Developed by | World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) |
| Initial release | 1993; 31 years ago |
| Type of format | Markup language |
| Standard | HTML Living Standard |
| Website | html.spec.whatwg.org |
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web pages. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript.
Web browsers receive HTML documents from a web server or from local storage and render the documents into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of a web page semantically and originally included cues for the appearance of the document. HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages. With HTML constructs, images and other objects such as interactive forms may be embedded into the rendered page. HTML provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes, and other items.
Contents
History [edit]
In 1980, physicist Tim Berners-Lee, a contractor at CERN, proposed and prototyped ENQUIRE, a system for CERN researchers to use and share documents. In 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a memo proposing an Internet-based hypertext system. Berners-Lee specified HTML and wrote the browser and server software in late 1990. That year, Berners-Lee and CERN data systems engineer Robert Cailliau collaborated on a joint request for funding, but the project was not formally adopted by CERN.
The first publicly available description of HTML was a document called "HTML Tags", first mentioned on the Internet by Tim Berners-Lee in late 1991. It describes 18 elements comprising the initial, relatively simple design of HTML. Except for the hyperlink tag, these were strongly influenced by SGMLguid, an in-house Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)-based documentation format at CERN.
Versions [edit]
| Version | Year |
|---|---|
| HTML 2.0 | 1995 |
| HTML 3.2 | 1997 |
| HTML 4.01 | 1999 |
| XHTML 1.0 | 2000 |
| HTML5 | 2014 |
| HTML Living Standard | Current |
Markup [edit]
HTML markup consists of several key components, including those called tags (and their attributes), character-based data types, character references and entity references. HTML tags most commonly come in pairs like <h1> and </h1>, although some represent empty elements and so are unpaired, for example <img>.
Elements [edit]
HTML elements are the most basic unit of HTML. An element typically consists of a start tag (e.g., <p>), an end tag (e.g., </p>), and the content in between. Elements can also be nested within one another:
<p>This is a paragraph that contains a <strong>bold</strong> word.</p>
Attributes [edit]
Most of the attributes of an element are name-value pairs, separated by "=" and written within the start tag of an element after the element's name. The value may be enclosed in single or double quotes. Common attributes include:
id: Provides a document-wide unique identifier for an element.class: Provides a way of classifying similar elements, often for styling purposes via CSS.src: Specifies the URL of an external resource, such as an image.href: Specifies the destination of a hyperlink.
Document Structure [edit]
A typical HTML document follows a strict hierarchical structure. Below is an example of a basic "Hello World" page:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is a Heading</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>
The <!DOCTYPE html> declaration is for HTML5. If it is not included, various browsers will revert to "quirks mode" for rendering. The <html> element is the root element of an HTML page. The <head> element contains meta information about the document, such as its title and links to scripts or stylesheets. The <body> element contains the visible page content.
Semantic HTML [edit]
Semantic HTML is the use of HTML markup to reinforce the semantics, or meaning, of the information in web pages and web applications rather than merely to define its presentation or look. For example, using the <b> tag (bold) provides only visual instruction to the browser, whereas the <strong> tag indicates that the text has strong importance.
Modern HTML introduces several semantic elements to define different parts of a web page:
<header>: Defines a header for a document or a section.<nav>: Defines a set of navigation links.<main>: Specifies the main content of a document.<footer>: Defines a footer for a document or a section.<article>: Defines an independent, self-contained article.
HTML5 [edit]
HTML5 is the fifth and current major version of the HTML standard. It was published in October 2014 by the W3C to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (web browsers, parsers, etc.).
HTML5 introduced features like the <video>, <audio> and <canvas> elements, as well as the integration of scalable vector graphics (SVG) content. These features were designed to make it easy to include and handle multimedia and graphical content on the web without having to resort to proprietary plugins and APIs.
Generation[edit]
| Provider | gemini |
|---|---|
| Model | gemini-3-flash-preview |
| Generated | 2026-03-20 22:03:15 UTC |
| Seed source | curated (deadlink) |
| Seed | HTML, the HyperText Markup Language that structures the web |