HTML

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages.

HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags, enclosed in angle brackets (like ), within the web page content. HTML tags most commonly come in pairs like and, although some tags, known as empty elements, are unpaired, for example. The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag (they are also called opening tags and closing tags). In between these tags web designers can add text, tags, comments, and other types of text-based content.

The purpose of a web browser is to read HTML documents and compose them into visible or audible web pages. The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page.

HTML elements form the building blocks of all websites. HTML allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. It can embed scripts in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML webpages.

Web browsers can also refer to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the appearance and layout of text and other material. The W3C, maintainer of both the HTML and the CSS standards, encourages the use of CSS over explicitly presentational HTML markup.

Origins


In 1980, physicist Tim Berners-Lee, who was a contractor at CERN, proposed and prototyped ENQUIRE, a system for CERN researchers to use and share documents. In 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a memo proposing an Internet-based hypertext system. Berners-Lee specified HTML and wrote the browser and server software in the last part of 1990. In that year, Berners-Lee and CERN data systems engineer Robert Cailliau collaborated on a joint request for funding, but the project was not formally adopted by CERN. In his personal notes from 1990 he lists "some of the many areas in which hypertext is used" and puts an encyclopedia first.

First specifications
The first publicly available description of HTML was a document called "HTML Tags", first mentioned on the Internet by Berners-Lee in late 1991. It describes 20 elements comprising the initial, relatively simple design of HTML. Except for the hyperlink tag, these were strongly influenced by SGMLguid, an in-house SGML based documentation format at CERN. Thirteen of these elements still exist in HTML 4.

Hypertext markup language is a markup language that web browsers use to interpret and compose text, images and other material into visual or audible web pages. Default characteristics for every item of HTML markup are defined in the browser, and these characteristics can be altered or enhanced by the web page designer's additional use of CSS. Many of the text elements are found in the 1988 ISO technical report TR 9537 Techniques for using SGML, which in turn covers the features of early text formatting languages such as that used by the RUNOFF command developed in the early 1960s for the CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System) operating system: these formatting commands were derived from the commands used by typesetters to manually format documents. However, the SGML concept of generalized markup is based on elements (nested annotated ranges with attributes) rather than merely print effects, with also the separation of structure and processing; HTML has been progressively moved in this direction with CSS.

Berners-Lee considered HTML to be an application of SGML. It was formally defined as such by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) with the mid-1993 publication of the first proposal for an HTML specification: "Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)" Internet-Draft by Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly, which included an SGML Document Type Definition to define the grammar. The draft expired after six months, but was notable for its acknowledgement of the NCSA Mosaic browser's custom tag for embedding in-line images, reflecting the IETF's philosophy of basing standards on successful prototypes. Similarly, Dave Raggett's competing Internet-Draft, "HTML+ (Hypertext Markup Format)", from late 1993, suggested standardizing already-implemented features like tables and fill-out forms.

After the HTML and HTML+ drafts expired in early 1994, the IETF created an HTML Working Group, which in 1995 completed "HTML 2.0", the first HTML specification intended to be treated as a standard against which future implementations should be based. Published as Request for Comments 1866, HTML 2.0 included ideas from the HTML and HTML+ drafts. The 2.0 designation was intended to distinguish the new edition from previous drafts.

Further development under the auspices of the IETF was stalled by competing interests. Since 1996, the HTML specifications have been maintained, with input from commercial software vendors, by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). However, in 2000, HTML also became an international standard (ISO/IEC 15445:2000). The last HTML specification published by the W3C is the HTML 4.01 Recommendation, published in late 1999. Its issues and errors were last acknowledged by errata published in 2001.

HTML version timeline

 * November 24, 1995: HTML 2.0 was published as IETF RFC 1866. Supplemental RFCs added capabilities:
 * November 25, 1995: RFC 1867 (form-based file upload)
 * May 1996: RFC 1942 (tables)
 * August 1996: RFC 1980 (client-side image maps)
 * January 1997: RFC 2070 (internationalization)
 * In June 2000, all of these were declared obsolete/historic by RFC 2854.


 * January 1997: HTML 3.2 was published as a W3C Recommendation. It was the first version developed and standardized exclusively by the W3C, as the IETF had closed its HTML Working Group in September 1996.
 * HTML 3.2 dropped math formulas entirely, reconciled overlap among various proprietary extensions and adopted most of Netscape's visual markup tags. Netscape's blink element and Microsoft's marquee element were omitted due to a mutual agreement between the two companies. A markup for mathematical formulas similar to that in HTML was not standardized until 14 months later in MathML.


 * December 1997: HTML 4.0 was published as a W3C Recommendation. It offers three variations:
 * Strict, in which deprecated elements are forbidden,
 * Transitional, in which deprecated elements are allowed,
 * Frameset, in which mostly only frame related elements are allowed;
 * Initially code-named "Cougar", HTML 4.0 adopted many browser-specific element types and attributes, but at the same time sought to phase out Netscape's visual markup features by marking them as deprecated in favor of style sheets. HTML 4 is an SGML application conforming to ISO 8879 - SGML.
 * April 1998: HTML 4.0 was reissued with minor edits without incrementing the version number.
 * December 1999: HTML 4.01 was published as a W3C Recommendation. It offers the same three variations as HTML 4.0 and its last errata were published May 12, 2001.
 * May 2000: ISO/IEC 15445:2000 ("ISO HTML", based on HTML 4.01 Strict) was published as an ISO/IEC international standard. In the ISO this standard falls in the domain of the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 (ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 34 - Document description and processing languages).
 * As of mid-2008, HTML 4.01 and ISO/IEC 15445:2000 are the most recent versions of HTML. Development of the parallel, XML-based language XHTML occupied the W3C's HTML Working Group through the early and mid-2000s.

HTML draft version timeline

 * October 1991: HTML Tags, an informal CERN document listing twelve HTML tags, was first mentioned in public.
 * June 1992: First informal draft of the HTML DTD, with seven subsequent revisions (July 15, August 6, August 18, November 17, November 19, November 20, November 22)
 * November 1992: HTML DTD 1.1 (the first with a version number, based on RCS revisions, which start with 1.1 rather than 1.0), an informal draft
 * June 1993: Hypertext Markup Language was published by the IETF IIIR Working Group as an Internet-Draft (a rough proposal for a standard). It was replaced by a second version one month later, followed by six further drafts published by IETF itself that finally led to HTML 2.0 in RFC1866
 * November 1993: HTML+ was published by the IETF as an Internet-Draft and was a competing proposal to the Hypertext Markup Language draft. It expired in May 1994.
 * April 1995 (authored March 1995): HTML 3.0 was proposed as a standard to the IETF, but the proposal expired five months later without further action. It included many of the capabilities that were in Raggett's HTML+ proposal, such as support for tables, text flow around figures and the display of complex mathematical formulas.
 * W3C began development of its own Arena browser as a test bed for HTML 3 and Cascading Style Sheets,  but HTML 3.0 did not succeed for several reasons. The draft was considered very large at 150 pages and the pace of browser development, as well as the number of interested parties, had outstripped the resources of the IETF. Browser vendors, including Microsoft and Netscape at the time, chose to implement different subsets of HTML 3's draft features as well as to introduce their own extensions to it. (See Browser wars) These included extensions to control stylistic aspects of documents, contrary to the "belief [of the academic engineering community] that such things as text color, background texture, font size and font face were definitely outside the scope of a language when their only intent was to specify how a document would be organized." Dave Raggett, who has been a W3C Fellow for many years has commented for example, "To a certain extent, Microsoft built its business on the Web by extending HTML features."


 * January 2008: HTML5 was published as a Working Draft (link) by the W3C.
 * Although its syntax closely resembles that of SGML, HTML5 has abandoned any attempt to be an SGML application and has explicitly defined its own "html" serialization, in addition to an alternative XML-based XHTML5 serialization.

XHTML versions
XHTML is a separate language that began as a reformulation of HTML 4.01 using XML 1.0. It continues to be developed:
 * XHTML 1.0, published January 26, 2000, as a W3C Recommendation, later revised and republished August 1, 2002. It offers the same three variations as HTML 4.0 and 4.01, reformulated in XML, with minor restrictions.
 * XHTML 1.1, published May 31, 2001, as a W3C Recommendation. It is based on XHTML 1.0 Strict, but includes minor changes, can be customized, is reformulated using modules from Modularization of XHTML, which was published April 10, 2001, as a W3C Recommendation.
 * XHTML 2.0,. There is no XHTML 2.0 standard. XHTML 2.0 is only a draft document and it is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress. XHTML 2.0 is incompatible with XHTML 1.x and, therefore, would be more accurately characterized as an XHTML-inspired new language than an update to XHTML 1.x.
 * XHTML5, which is an update to XHTML 1.x, is being defined alongside HTML5 in the HTML5 draft.

Markup
HTML markup consists of several key components, including elements (and their attributes), character-based data types, character references and entity references. Another important component is the document type declaration, which triggers standards mode rendering.

The Hello world program, a common computer program employed for comparing programming languages, scripting languages and markup languages is made of 9 lines of code, although in HTML newlines are optional: (The text between and describes the web page, and the text between and is the visible page content. The markup text ' Hello HTML ' defines the browser tab title.)

This Document Type Declaration is for HTML5. If the  declaration is not included, various browsers will revert to "quirks mode" for rendering.

Elements
HTML documents are composed entirely of HTML elements that, in their most general form have three components: a pair of tags, a "start tag" and "end tag"; some attributes within the start tag; and finally, any textual and graphical content between the start and end tags, perhaps including other nested elements. The HTML element is everything between and including the start and end tags. Each tag is enclosed in angle brackets.

The general form of an HTML element is therefore: . Some HTML elements are defined as empty elements and take the form. Empty elements may enclose no content. The name of an HTML element is the name used in the tags. Note that the end tag's name is preceded by a slash character, "/", and that in empty elements the slash does not appear. If attributes are not mentioned, default values are used in each case.

Element examples
Header of the HTML document: ... . Usually the title should be included in the head, for example: Headings: HTML headings are defined with the to tags:

Paragraphs: Line breaks:. The difference between  and   is that 'br' breaks a line without altering the semantic structure of the page, whereas 'p' sections the page into paragraphs. Note also that 'br' is an empty element in that, while it may have attributes, it can take no content and it does not have to have an end tag. Comments: establishes "Golf" as a second-level heading. Structural markup does not denote any specific rendering, but most web browsers have default styles for element formatting. Content may be further styled using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
 * Presentational markup describes the appearance of the text, regardless of its purpose: For example  indicates that visual output devices should render "boldface" in bold text, but gives little indication what devices that are unable to do this (such as aural devices that read the text aloud) should do. In the case of both   and , there are other elements that may have equivalent visual renderings but which are more semantic in nature, such as   and   respectively. It is easier to see how an aural user agent should interpret the latter two elements. However, they are not equivalent to their presentational counterparts: it would be undesirable for a screen-reader to emphasize the name of a book, for instance, but on a screen such a name would be italicized. Most presentational markup elements have become deprecated under the HTML 4.0 specification, in favor of using CSS for styling.
 * Hypertext markup makes parts of a document into links to other documents: An anchor element creates a hyperlink in the document and its  attribute sets the link's target URL. For example the HTML markup, , will render the word " Wikipedia " as a hyperlink. To render an image as a hyperlink, an 'img' element is inserted as content into the 'a' element. Like 'br', 'img' is an empty element with attributes but no content or closing tag..

Attributes
Most of the attributes of an element are name-value pairs, separated by "=" and written within the start tag of an element after the element's name. The value may be enclosed in single or double quotes, although values consisting of certain characters can be left unquoted in HTML (but not XHTML). Leaving attribute values unquoted is considered unsafe. In contrast with name-value pair attributes, there are some attributes that affect the element simply by their presence in the start tag of the element, like the  attribute for the   element.

There are several common attributes that may appear in many elements:


 * The  attribute provides a document-wide unique identifier for an element. This is used to identify the element so that stylesheets can alter its presentational properties, and scripts may alter, animate or delete its contents or presentation. Appended to the URL of the page, it provides a globally unique identifier for the element, typically a sub-section of the page. For example, the ID "Attributes" in
 * The  attribute provides a way of classifying similar elements. This can be used for semantic or presentation purposes. For example, an HTML document might semantically use the designation   to indicate that all elements with this class value are subordinate to the main text of the document. In presentation, such elements might be gathered together and presented as footnotes on a page instead of appearing in the place where they occur in the HTML source. Class attributes are used semantically in microformats. Multiple class values may be specified; for example   puts the element into both the 'notation' and the 'important' classes.
 * An author may use the  attribute to assign presentational properties to a particular element. It is considered better practice to use an element's   or   attributes to select the element from within a stylesheet, though sometimes this can be too cumbersome for a simple, specific, or ad hoc styling.
 * The  attribute is used to attach subtextual explanation to an element. In most browsers this attribute is displayed as a tooltip.
 * The  attribute identifies the natural language of the element's contents, which may be different from that of the rest of the document. For example, in an English-language document:

The abbreviation element,, can be used to demonstrate some of these attributes:

This example displays as HTML ; in most browsers, pointing the cursor at the abbreviation should display the title text "Hypertext Markup Language."

Most elements also take the language-related attribute  to specify text direction, such as with "rtl" for right-to-left text in, for example, Arabic, Persian or Hebrew.

Character and entity references
As of version 4.0, HTML defines a set of 252 character entity references and a set of 1,114,050 numeric character references, both of which allow individual characters to be written via simple markup, rather than literally. A literal character and its markup counterpart are considered equivalent and are rendered identically.

The ability to "escape" characters in this way allows for the characters  and   (when written as   and , respectively) to be interpreted as character data, rather than markup. For example, a literal  normally indicates the start of a tag, and   normally indicates the start of a character entity reference or numeric character reference; writing it as   or   or   allows   to be included in the content of an element or in the value of an attribute. The double-quote character, when not used to quote an attribute value, must also be escaped as  or   or   when it appears within the attribute value itself. Equivalently, the single-quote character, when used to quote an attribute value, must also be escaped as  or   (not as   except in XHTML documents ) when it appears within the attribute value itself. If document authors overlook the need to escape such characters, some browsers can be very forgiving and try to use context to guess their intent. The result is still invalid markup, which makes the document less accessible to other browsers and to other user agents that may try to parse the document for search and indexing purposes for example.

Escaping also allows for characters that are not easily typed, or that are not available in the document's character encoding, to be represented within element and attribute content. For example, the acute-accented , a character typically found only on Western European keyboards, can be written in any HTML document as the entity reference   or as the numeric references   or  , using characters that are available on all keyboards and are supported in all character encodings. Unicode character encodings such as UTF-8 are compatible with all modern browsers and allow direct access to almost all the characters of the world's writing systems.

Data types
HTML defines several data types for element content, such as script data and stylesheet data, and a plethora of types for attribute values, including IDs, names, URIs, numbers, units of length, languages, media descriptors, colors, character encodings, dates and times, and so on. All of these data types are specializations of character data.

Document type declaration
HTML documents are required to start with a Document Type Declaration (informally, a "doctype"). In browsers, the doctype helps to define the rendering mode—particularly whether to use quirks mode.

The original purpose of the doctype was to enable parsing and validation of HTML documents by SGML tools based on the Document Type Definition (DTD). The DTD to which the DOCTYPE refers contains a machine-readable grammar specifying the permitted and prohibited content for a document conforming to such a DTD. Browsers, on the other hand, do not implement HTML as an application of SGML and by consequence do not read the DTD. HTML5 does not define a DTD, because of the technology's inherent limitations, so in HTML5 the doctype declaration,, does not refer to a DTD.

An example of an HTML 4 doctype is

This declaration references the DTD for the 'strict' version of HTML 4.01. SGML-based validators read the DTD in order to properly parse the document and to perform validation. In modern browsers, a valid doctype activates standards mode as opposed to quirks mode.

In addition, HTML 4.01 provides Transitional and Frameset DTDs, as explained below.

Semantic HTML
Semantic HTML is a way of writing HTML that emphasizes the meaning of the encoded information over its presentation (look). HTML has included semantic markup from its inception, but has also included presentational markup such as. The introduction of this shorthand, which is not used in the SGML declaration for HTML 4.01, may confuse earlier software unfamiliar with this new convention. A fix for this is to include a space before closing the tag, as such:.

To understand the subtle differences between HTML and XHTML, consider the transformation of a valid and well-formed XHTML 1.0 document that adheres to Appendix C (see below) into a valid HTML 4.01 document. To make this translation requires the following steps:
 * 1) The language for an element should be specified with a   attribute rather than the XHTML   attribute. XHTML uses XML's built in language-defining functionality attribute.
 * 2) Remove the XML namespace . HTML has no facilities for namespaces.
 * 3) Change the document type declaration from XHTML 1.0 to HTML 4.01. (see DTD section for further explanation).
 * 4) If present, remove the XML declaration. (Typically this is:  ).
 * 5) Ensure that the document's MIME type is set to  . For both HTML and XHTML, this comes from the HTTP   header sent by the server.
 * 6) Change the XML empty-element syntax to an HTML style empty element (  to  ).

Those are the main changes necessary to translate a document from XHTML 1.0 to HTML 4.01. To translate from HTML to XHTML would also require the addition of any omitted opening or closing tags. Whether coding in HTML or XHTML it may just be best to always include the optional tags within an HTML document rather than remembering which tags can be omitted.

A well-formed XHTML document adheres to all the syntax requirements of XML. A valid document adheres to the content specification for XHTML, which describes the document structure.

The W3C recommends several conventions to ensure an easy migration between HTML and XHTML (see HTML Compatibility Guidelines). The following steps can be applied to XHTML 1.0 documents only:
 * Include both  and   attributes on any elements assigning language.
 * Use the empty-element syntax only for elements specified as empty in HTML.
 * Include an extra space in empty-element tags: for example  instead of.
 * Include explicit close tags for elements that permit content but are left empty (for example, , not  ).
 * Omit the XML declaration.

By carefully following the W3C's compatibility guidelines, a user agent should be able to interpret the document equally as HTML or XHTML. For documents that are XHTML 1.0 and have been made compatible in this way, the W3C permits them to be served either as HTML (with a  MIME type), or as XHTML (with an   or   MIME type). When delivered as XHTML, browsers should use an XML parser, which adheres strictly to the XML specifications for parsing the document's contents.

Transitional versus strict
HTML 4 defined three different versions of the language: Strict, Transitional (once called Loose) and Frameset. The Strict version is intended for new documents and is considered best practice, while the Transitional and Frameset versions were developed to make it easier to transition documents that conformed to older HTML specification or didn't conform to any specification to a version of HTML 4. The Transitional and Frameset versions allow for presentational markup, which is omitted in the Strict version. Instead, cascading style sheets are encouraged to improve the presentation of HTML documents. Because XHTML 1 only defines an XML syntax for the language defined by HTML 4, the same differences apply to XHTML 1 as well. The Transitional version allows the following parts of the vocabulary, which are not included in the Strict version:
 * A looser content model
 * Inline elements and plain text are allowed directly in:,  ,  ,   and
 * Presentation related elements
 * underline (Deprecated. can confuse a visitor with a hyperlink.)
 * strike-through
 * (Deprecated. use CSS instead.)
 * (Deprecated. use CSS instead.)
 * (Deprecated. use CSS instead.)
 * Presentation related attributes
 * (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) and (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attributes for  (required element according to the W3C.) element.
 * (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attribute on,  , paragraph  and heading ( ... ) elements
 * (Deprecated. use CSS instead.), (Deprecated. use CSS instead.),  (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) and  (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attributes on   element
 * (Deprecated. use CSS instead.),,   and   attributes on   and  (caution: the   element is only supported in Internet Explorer(from the major browsers)) elements
 * (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attribute on  and   elements
 * (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) and (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) on   element
 * (Obsolete), (Deprecated. use CSS instead.), ,   on   and   elements
 * (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attribute on  element
 * (Obsolete) attribute on  element
 * attribute on,   and   elements
 * (Deprecated. use CSS instead.), (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) and  (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attributes on   and   elements
 * and  attributes on   element
 * attribute on  element
 * Additional elements in Transitional specification
 * (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) list (no substitute, though unordered list is recommended)
 * (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) list (no substitute, though unordered list is recommended)
 * (Deprecated.) (element requires server-side support and is typically added to documents server-side,  and   elements can be used as a substitute)
 * (Deprecated. use the  element instead.)
 * The (Obsolete) attribute on script element (redundant with the   attribute).
 * Frame related entities
 * (Deprecated in the,   and   elements.) attribute on  , client-side image-map ,  ,   and   elements
 * (Deprecated in the,   and   elements.) attribute on  , client-side image-map ,  ,   and   elements
 * (Deprecated in the,   and   elements.) attribute on  , client-side image-map ,  ,   and   elements

The Frameset version includes everything in the Transitional version, as well as the  element (used instead of  ) and the   element.

Frameset versus transitional
In addition to the above transitional differences, the frameset specifications (whether XHTML 1.0 or HTML 4.01) specifies a different content model, with  replacing , that contains either   elements, or optionally   with a.

Summary of specification versions
As this list demonstrates, the loose versions of the specification are maintained for legacy support. However, contrary to popular misconceptions, the move to XHTML does not imply a removal of this legacy support. Rather the X in XML stands for extensible and the W3C is modularizing the entire specification and opening it up to independent extensions. The primary achievement in the move from XHTML 1.0 to XHTML 1.1 is the modularization of the entire specification. The strict version of HTML is deployed in XHTML 1.1 through a set of modular extensions to the base XHTML 1.1 specification. Likewise, someone looking for the loose (transitional) or frameset specifications will find similar extended XHTML 1.1 support (much of it is contained in the legacy or frame modules). The modularization also allows for separate features to develop on their own timetable. So for example, XHTML 1.1 will allow quicker migration to emerging XML standards such as MathML (a presentational and semantic math language based on XML) and XForms—a new highly advanced web-form technology to replace the existing HTML forms.

In summary, the HTML 4.01 specification primarily reined in all the various HTML implementations into a single clearly written specification based on SGML. XHTML 1.0, ported this specification, as is, to the new XML defined specification. Next, XHTML 1.1 takes advantage of the extensible nature of XML and modularizes the whole specification. XHTML 2.0 will be the first step in adding new features to the specification in a standards-body-based approach.

Hypertext features not in HTML
HTML lacks some of the features found in earlier hypertext systems, such as typed links, source tracking, fat links and others. Even some hypertext features that were in early versions of HTML have been ignored by most popular web browsers until recently, such as the link element and in-browser Web page editing.

Sometimes Web services or browser manufacturers remedy these shortcomings. For instance, wikis and content management systems allow surfers to edit the Web pages they visit.

WYSIWYG editors
There are some WYSIWYG editors (What You See Is What You Get), in which the user lays out everything as it is to appear in the HTML document using a graphical user interface (GUI), where the editor renders this as an HTML document, no longer requiring the author to have extensive knowledge of HTML.

The WYSIWYG editing model has been criticized, primarily because of the low quality of the generated code; there are voices advocating a change to the WYSIWYM model (What You See Is What You Mean).

WYSIWYG editors remains a controversial topic because of their perceived flaws such as:


 * Relying mainly on layout as opposed to meaning, often using markup that does not convey the intended meaning but simply copies the layout.
 * Often producing extremely verbose and redundant code that fails to make use of the cascading nature of HTML and CSS.
 * Often producing ungrammatical markup often called tag soup.
 * As a great deal of information of HTML documents is not in the layout, the model has been criticized for its 'what you see is all you get'-nature.