Developed by: WHATWG
Container for: HTML elements
Extended from: SGML
Extended to: XHTML
Initial release: 1993
Latest release: Living Standard
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is a standard markup language used for creating web pages and web applications. It is used to define the structure and content of web pages by using various tags and attributes to describe the elements on a page, such as headings, paragraphs, images, links, forms, and tables.
HTML works in conjunction with other web technologies such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript to create interactive and dynamic web pages. HTML files can be created using a simple text editor and are viewed using a web browser.
HTML is constantly evolving and the latest version is HTML5, which includes new elements and attributes for creating more advanced web applications, such as audio and video players, graphics, and animations.
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. 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 its appearance.
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. HTML elements are delineated by tags, written using angle brackets. Tags such as <img /> and <input /> directly introduce content to the page. Other tags such as <p> and </p> surround and provide information about document text and may include sub-element tags. Browsers do not display the HTML tags but use them to interpret the content of the page.
HTML can embed programs written in a scripting language such as JavaScript, which affects the behavior and content of web pages. The inclusion of CSS defines the look and layout of content. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), former maintainer of the HTML and current maintainer of the CSS standards, has encouraged the use of CSS over explicit presentational HTML since 1997. A form of HTML, known as HTML5, is used to display video and audio, primarily using the <canvas> element, together with JavaScript.