.HTML

Introduction

HTML is the language of web pages. Tim Berners-Lee created it at CERN around 1990, together with the first web browser and server. An HTML file is text marked up with tags that say what each part is, such as a heading, paragraph, link, image or table, and browsers turn it into the page you see, styled by CSS and made interactive by JavaScript. Saved web pages, email newsletters and help files are often HTML too.

HTML is maintained by WHATWG as a “living standard” that is updated continuously, rather than in numbered versions. Files use .html, or .htm from the days of three-letter extensions.

Structure

An HTML document starts with <!DOCTYPE html>, then an html element holding a head, with the title, character encoding and links to stylesheets and scripts, and a body with the content. Elements are written as a start tag, content and an end tag, such as <p>Hello</p>, and start tags carry attributes such as href on a link. Characters that have a meaning in markup are written as character references, such as & for an ampersand. Browsers parse even badly formed HTML in a way the standard defines exactly.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <title>A small page</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Hello</h1>
  <p>Read the <a href="https://html.spec.whatwg.org/">HTML standard</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>

Links