There are many individuals who have never heard of HTML and than there are people who have heard of it but have no clue what it is or how it works. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and it is a language used to describe web pages. Now don’t be confused HTML is not programming language, it is a markup language which is made up of markup tags used to describe the webpage. These tags are key words usually surrounded by angle brackets such as , the tags normally come in pairs commonly known as opening tags and closing tags. HTML is easily accessible, you don’t need any tools such as an HTML editor, web server or web site. HTML was created in 1989 by a physicist named Tim Berners-Lee and an engineer named Robert Caiilliau, both men collaborated their ideas together to propose an Internet-based hypertext system for CERN. In HTML the elements are the basic components foe markup, the elements have to different properties known as attributes and content. In HTML’s programming there is structural, hypertext and presentational markup, each serves its own purpose. Structural markup describes the purpose of the text and does not denote any specific rendering. On the other hand, presentational markup describes the appearance of the text regardless of its function. Last but not least hypertext markup links parts of the document to other documents.
The majority of attributes in an element are name-value pairs that are by an equal sign usually written within the start tag of an element. Depending upon the value of the attributes they can either be double or single quoted; however, if the attributes contain certain characters they do not have to be quoted at all. The new 4.0 version of HTML provides many new functions and allows for simple markup. One feature is the ability to escape characters and to still have them represented. Characters that are not easily typed or that are not even available in the document’s character encoding to be represented within the element and attribute content. For those of you wondering what character coding is, it is a system consisting of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else. Character coding is similar to character set, character map and code page. Another unique feature of HTML is that it defines a variety of data types for element content. For example, it defines script data and style sheet data. Also, it will define attribute values such as Ids, names, Urls, numbers, units of length, languages, media descriptors, colors, character encodings, dates and times, etc… . Data types in HTML are sets of values and the operations of those values. An important fact about HTML is that all HTML documents are required to start with Document Type Declaration. These DOCTYPE are instructions that associate particular SGML or XML document with a document type definition. The document type definition also known as DTD is set of markup declarations that define a document type for SGML-family markup languages. Many of you have heard and used the World Wide Web but do you know that it is primarily made up of HTML documents transmitted from web servers to web browsers using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
