HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a computer language computer scientists developed in order to allow the creation of websites. It appeared in the early 1990s and was designed by Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), as a system for researchers to share and read documents.
It instructs a web browser how to interpret and compose text, images, and other material into visual or audible web pages. This is accomplished by tags, which indicate to the browser how to display the content. The tags label pieces of content such as "heading", "paragraph" or "table". Browsers do not display the tags, but use them to render the content of the page.
Hypertext is a way to move around the Web, by clicking on specific parts of text, which are named hyperlinks and often appear in a different colour. A hyperlink directs the user to another page on the Internet. The term hyper means that a text is not linear, but a user is able to visit any page on the Internet by clicking on the hyperlinks in no predetermined order.
Markup refers to the HTML tags that mark certain parts of text to be displayed differently by the web browser (e.g. bold text or italic text). Tags come usually in pairs, like this: <title> and </title>. The first tag in the pair indicates where the title begins and the second one marks where it ends.
HTML is a language because it has code words and syntax like any other programming language.
A basic example of HTML code: The code on the left looks like this on the screen:
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<html> <head> <h1>Newsreel</h1> </head> <body> <p>European project</p> </body> </html> |
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The HTML specifications are maintained and developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), founded in 1994 by Berners-Lee. W3C constantly analyses and revises the code according to the technological developments and online audience demands. The first set of standardised specifications was published in 1995 as HTML 2.0. Since then, HTML has evolved up to version 5.2 (its most recent set was issued in 2017).
