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Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for creating [web page]?s, that is, information presented on the World Wide Web. Derived from SGML, which was used by the publishing industry, it is now an Internet standard maintained by the [World Wide Web Consortium]. The [specification] for version 4.01 is available there.

HTML generally appears in [text file]?s either stored or created by computers, and then sent over the internet to a web browser. These files contain marked-up text, that is, instructions for how a web browser should render the page. There are a number of different kinds of markup? tag? in HTML - perhaps the most important being the hyperlink? tag, <a>, which allows links to be made between documents on the World Wide Web. Other tags tell the browser exactly how to render the text, such as and , which should produce <b>embolden and <i>italicised text respectively, others give more general instructions, such as and , which instruct the browser to <em>emphasise the text or to make it <strong>stronger than the rest of the text. Other tags allow for metadata to be included, such as the title of the page, or delimiting the header and body sections, which are all included within the <html> .. </html> tags. Other tags which have been added later as the specification evolved allow in-line pictures and video, tables and other enhancements required.

Why doesn't this work?

HTML generally appears in [text file]?s either stored or created by computers, and then sent over the internet to a web browser. These files contain marked-up text, that is, instructions for how a web browser should render the page. There are a number of different kinds of markup? tag? in HTML - perhaps the most important being the hyperlink? tag, <a>, which allows links to be made between documents on the World Wide Web. Other tags tell the browser exactly how to render the text, such as <b> ; &lt;b&gt;

WHAT??? Grr. I'm off to bed. Message me if you have any ideas. Dave McKee


What does not work? While editing the Dutch page about HTML, I discovered the hard way that you should put code examples between PRE (multi-line) or CODE tags.

Also, are you sure HTML started out as an SGML application? IIRC, HTML 1.x was an SGML-like application, with version 2.0 being the first real SGML app.


Berners-Lee conceptually based HTML on SGML. The first versions were not conforming implementations of SGML--for good reasons. Specifically, conformance required far more resources than was necessary to get the functionality he needed, so he simplified the syntax considerably. --LDC

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Last edited December 18, 2001 7:49 am by Lee Daniel Crocker (diff)
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