HTML

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the standard markup language used for creating web pages and web applications. Along with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript, it forms the foundation for building and developing pages on the World Wide Web.

Through using HTML structured documents can be made, for example, by organizing the content, indicating where to place paragraphs, headings, lists, numbering, etc. The language consists of tags and attributes to structure the content and instruct the browser how to present the web page. Tags are written using angle brackets and attributes are placed inside tags to provide the browser more detail about the tags. The tags are not displayed on the webpage, the information is solely for the browser to use and follow.

Web developers aim to use HTML mark up lightly to avoid having an unnecessary amount of tags that make the process more complex.  The less HTML code the browsers have to remove (to find textual content), the more effective they will be at determining the purpose of the webpage.

HTML can make use of JavaScript and CSS to change the behaviour and content of web pages. The inclusion of CSS defines the presentation and layout of the content. HTML was previously used for visual formatting of web text, using tags with attributes to determine font size and colour etc. Today, however, it is considered mainly responsible for the semantic markup in order to keep a clear designated focus for the language.

Tim Burners-Lee wrote the software in 1990 and it was first released in 1993, by 1995 it was officially recognised as a standard to base future implementations and should be supported by browsers and other web software. Since then, 1996, the HTML specifications have been maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium, with added input from commercial software vendors.