Html

Html

Filename extension	.html .htm
Internet media type	text/html
Type code	TEXT
Uniform Type Identifier (UTI)	public.html
Developed by	WHATWG World Wide Web Consortium (W3C; formerly)
Initial release	1993 (1993)
Latest release	Living Standard
Type of format	Document file format
Container for	HTML elements
Contained by	Web browser
Extended from	SGML
Extended to	XHTML
Website	html.spec.whatwg.org

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript.

Web browsers receive HTML documents from a web server or from local storage and render the documents into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of a web page semantically and originally included cues for its appearance.

HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages. With HTML constructs, images and other objects such as interactive forms may be embedded into the rendered page. HTML provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes, and other items. HTML elements are delineated by tags, written using angle brackets. Tags such as <img> and <input> directly introduce content into the page. Other tags such as <p> and its corresponding closing tag </p> surround and provide information about document text and may include sub-element tags. Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use them to interpret the content of the page.

HTML can embed programs written in a scripting language such as JavaScript, which affects the behavior and content of web pages. The inclusion of CSS defines the look and layout of content. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), former maintainer of the HTML and current maintainer of the CSS standards, has encouraged the use of CSS over explicit presentational HTML

History

Development

Tim Berners-Lee in April 2009

In 1980, the physicist Tim Berners-Lee, 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 late 1990. 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 of 1990, Berners-Lee listed "some of the many areas in which hypertext is used"; an encyclopedia is the first entry.

The first publicly available description of HTML was a document called "HTML Tags", first mentioned on the Internet by Tim Berners-Lee in late 1991. It describes 18 elements comprising the initial, relatively simple design of HTML. Except for the hyperlink tag, these were strongly influenced by CERN SGML, an in-house Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)-based documentation format at CERN. Eleven of these elements still exist in HTML 4.

HTML is a markup language that web browsers use to interpret and compose text, images, and other material into visible 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 mentioned in the 1988 ISO technical report TR 9537 Techniques for using SGML, which describes 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 separate structure and markup. HTML has been progressively moved in this direction with CSS.

HTML version timeline

HTML 2

24 November 1995

HTML 2.0 was published as RFC 1866. Supplemental RFCs added capabilities:

• 25 November 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)

HTML 3

14 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 on 12 September 1996.

Initially code-named "Wilbur", 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 of HTML was standardized 14 months later in MathML.

HTML 4

18 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 also 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.

24 April 1998

HTML 4.0 was reissued with minor edits without incrementing the version number.

24 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 on 12 May 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 is in the domain of the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 (ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 34 – Document description and processing languages).

After HTML 4.01, there were no new versions of HTML for many years, as the development of the parallel, XML-based language XHTML occupied the W3C's HTML Working Group.

HTML 5

Main article: HTML5

28 October 2014

HTML5 was published as a W3C Recommendation.

1 November 2016

HTML 5.1 was published as a W3C Recommendation.

14 December 2017

HTML 5.2 was published as a W3C Recommendation.

Markup

HTML markup consists of several key components, including those called tags (and their attributes), character-based data types, character references and entity references. HTML tags most commonly come in pairs like <h1> and </h1>, although some represent empty elements and so are unpaired, for example <img>. The first tag in such a pair is the start tag, and the second is the end tag (they are also called opening tags and closing tags).

Another important component is the HTML document type declaration, which triggers standards mode rendering.

The following is an example of the classic "Hello, World!" program:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>This is a title</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div>
        <p>Hello world!</p>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

The text between <html> and </html> describes the web page, and the text between <body> and </body> is the visible page content. The markup text <title>This is a title</title> defines the browser page title shown on browser tabs and window titles and the tag <div> defines a division of the page used for easy styling. Between <head> and </head>, a <meta> element can be used to define webpage metadata.

Elements

HTML documents imply a structure of nested HTML elements. These are indicated in the document by HTML tags, enclosed in angle brackets. In the simple, general case, the extent of an element is indicated by a pair of tags: a "start tag" <p> and "end tag" </p>. The text content of the element, if any, is placed between these tags.

Tags may also enclose further tag markup between the start and end, including a mixture of tags and text. This indicates further (nested) elements, as children of the parent element.

The start tag may also include the element's attributes within the tag. These indicate other information, such as identifiers for sections within the document, identifiers used to bind style information to the presentation of the document, and for some tags such as the <img> used to embed images, the reference to the image resource in the format like this: <img src="example.com/example.jpg">

Some elements, such as the line break <br> do not permit any embedded content, either text or further tags. These require only a single empty tag (akin to a start tag) and do not use an end tag.

Many tags, particularly the closing end tag for the very commonly used paragraph element <p>, are optional. An HTML browser or other agent can infer the closure for the end of an element from the context and the structural rules defined by the HTML standard. These rules are complex and not widely understood by most HTML authors.

Element examples

See also: HTML element

Header of the HTML document: <head>...</head>. The title is included in the head, for example:

<head>
  <title>The Title</title>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="stylebyjimbowales.css"> <!-- Imports Stylesheets -->
</head>

Headings

HTML headings are defined with the <h1> to <h6> tags with H1 being the highest (or most important) level and H6 the least:

<h1>Heading level 1</h1>
<h2>Heading level 2</h2>
<h3>Heading level 3</h3>
<h4>Heading level 4</h4>
<h5>Heading level 5</h5>
<h6>Heading level 6</h6>

The effects are:

Heading Level 1

Heading Level 2

Heading Level 3

Heading Level 4

Heading Level 5

Heading Level 6

CSS can substantially change the rendering.

Paragraphs:

<p>Paragraph 1</p> <p>Paragraph 2</p>

Line breaks

<br>. The difference between <br> and <p> is that <br> breaks a line without altering the semantic structure of the page, whereas <p> sections the page into paragraphs. The element <br> is an empty element in that, although it may have attributes, it can take no content and it must not have an end tag.

<p>This <br> is a paragraph <br> with <br> line breaks</p>

Links

This is a link in HTML. To create a link the <a> tag is used. The href attribute holds the URL address of the link.

<a href="https://www.wikipedia.org/">A link to Wikipedia!</a>

Inputs

There are many possible ways a user can give inputs like:

<input type="text"> <!-- This is for text input -->
<input type="file"> <!-- This is for uploading files -->
<input type="checkbox"> <!-- This is for checkboxes -->

Comments:

<!-- This is a comment -->

Comments can help in the understanding of the markup and do not display in the webpage.

There are several types of markup elements used in HTML:

• Structural markup indicates the purpose of text:
  • For example, <h2>Golf</h2> 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 indicates the appearance of the text, regardless of its purpose:
  • For example, <b>bold text</b> 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 <b>bold text</b> and <i>italic text</i>, there are other elements that may have equivalent visual renderings but that are more semantic in nature, such as <strong>strong text</strong> and <em>emphasized text</em> 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 href attribute sets the link's target URL. For example, the HTML markup <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a>, 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. <a href="https://example.org"><img src="image.gif" alt="descriptive text" width="50" height="50" border="0"></a>.

Attributes

Main article: HTML attribute

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 ismap attribute for the img element.

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

• The id 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Attributes.
• The class 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 <class="notation"> 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 <class="notation important"> puts the element into both the notation and the important classes.
• An author may use the style attribute to assign presentational properties to a particular element. It is considered better practice to use an element's id or class 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 title attribute is used to attach a subtextual explanation to an element. In most browsers this attribute is displayed as a tooltip.
• The lang 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:

  <p>Oh well, <span lang="fr">c'est la vie</span>, as they say in France.</p>
  

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

<abbr id="anId" class="jargon" style="color:purple;" title="Hypertext Markup Language">HTML</abbr>

Character and entity references

See also: List of XML and HTML character entity references and Unicode and HTML

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 not used to quote an attribute value, must also be escaped as ' or ' (or as ' in HTML5 or 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 the element and attribute content. For example, the acute-accented e (é), a character typically found only on Western European and South American keyboards, can be written in any HTML document as the entity reference é or as the numeric references é or é, 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.

HTML escape sequence examples

Named	Decimal	Hexadecimal	Result	Description	Notes
&	&	&	&	Ampersand
&lt;	&#60;	&#x3C;	<	Less Than
&gt;	&#62;	&#x3E;	>	Greater Than
&quot;	&#34;	&#x22;	"	Double Quote
&apos;	&#39;	&#x27;	'	Single Quote
&nbsp;	&#160;	&#xA0;		Non-Breaking Space
&copy;	&#169;	&#xA9;	©	Copyright
&reg;	&#174;	&#xAE;	®	Registered Trademark
&dagger;	&#8224;	&#x2020;	†	Dagger
&ddagger;	&#8225;	&#x2021;	‡	Double dagger	Names are case-sensitive and may have synonyms.
&trade;	&#8482;	&#x2122;	™	Trademark

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 the 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 as consequence do not read the DTD.

HTML5 does not define a DTD; therefore, in HTML5 the doctype declaration is simpler and shorter:

<!DOCTYPE html>

An example of an HTML 4 doctype

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

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.

Semantic HTML

Main article: 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 <font>, <i>, and <center> tags. There are also the semantically neutral div and span tags. Since the late 1990s, when Cascading Style Sheets were beginning to work in most browsers, web authors have been encouraged to avoid the use of presentational HTML markup with a view to the separation of content and presentation.

Delivery

HTML documents can be delivered by the same means as any other computer file. However, they are most often delivered either by HTTP from a web server or by email.

HTTP

Main article: HTTP

The World Wide Web is composed primarily of HTML documents transmitted from web servers to web browsers using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). However, HTTP is used to serve images, sound, and other content, in addition to HTML. To allow the web browser to know how to handle each document it receives, other information is transmitted along with the document. This meta data usually includes the MIME type (e.g., text/html or application/xhtml+xml) and the character encoding (see Character encodings in HTML).

In modern browsers, the MIME type that is sent with the HTML document may affect how the document is initially interpreted. A document sent with the XHTML MIME type is expected to be well-formed XML; syntax errors may cause the browser to fail to render it. The same document sent with the HTML MIME type might be displayed successfully since some browsers are more lenient with HTML.

The W3C recommendations state that XHTML 1.0 documents that follow guidelines set forth in the recommendation's Appendix C may be labeled with either MIME Type. XHTML 1.1 also states that XHTML 1.1 documents should You are invited to add it here. be labeled with either MIME type.

HTML e-mail

Most graphical email clients allow the use of a subset of HTML (often ill-defined) to provide formatting and semantic markup not available with plain text. This may include typographic information like colored headings, emphasized and quoted text, inline images and diagrams. Many such clients include both a GUI editor for composing HTML e-mail messages and a rendering engine for displaying them. Use of HTML in e-mail is criticized by some because of compatibility issues, because it can help disguise phishing attacks, because of accessibility issues for blind or visually impaired people, because it can confuse spam filters and because the message size is larger than plain text.

Naming conventions

The most common filename extension for files containing HTML is .html. A common abbreviation of this is .htm, which originated because some operating systems limit file extensions to three letters.

HTML Application

Main article: HTML Application

An HTML Application (HTA; file extension .hta) is a Microsoft Windows application that uses HTML and Dynamic HTML in a browser to provide the application's graphical interface. A regular HTML file is confined to the security model of the web browser's security, communicating only to web servers and manipulating only web page objects and site cookies. An HTA runs as a fully trusted application and therefore has more privileges, like creation/editing/removal of files and Windows Registry entries. Because they operate outside the browser's security model, HTAs cannot be executed via HTTP, but must be downloaded (just like an EXE file) and executed from local file system.

SGML-based versus XML-based HTML

One difference in the latest HTML specifications lies in the distinction between the SGML-based specification and the XML-based specification. The XML-based specification is usually called XHTML to distinguish it clearly from the more traditional definition. However, the root element name continues to be "html" even in the XHTML-specified HTML. The W3C intended XHTML 1.0 to be identical to HTML 4.01 except where limitations of XML over the more complex SGML require workarounds. Because XHTML and HTML are closely related, they are sometimes documented in parallel. In such circumstances, some authors conflate the two names as (X)HTML or X(HTML).

Like HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 has three sub-specifications: strict, transitional, and frameset.

Aside from the different opening declarations for a document, the differences between an HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 document—in each of the corresponding DTDs—are largely syntactic. The underlying syntax of HTML allows many shortcuts that XHTML does not, such as elements with optional opening or closing tags, and even empty elements which must not have an end tag. By contrast, XHTML requires all elements to have an opening tag and a closing tag. XHTML, however, also introduces a new shortcut: an XHTML tag may be opened and closed within the same tag, by including a slash before the end of the tag like this: <br/>. 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 remove the slash preceding the closing angle bracket, as such: <br>.

WHATWG HTML versus HTML5

The HTML Living Standard, which is developed by WHATWG, is the official version, while W3C HTML5 is no longer separate from WHATWG.

WYSIWYG editors

WYSIWYG editors (what you see is what you get), are HTML editors in which the user lays out everything as it is to appear in the HTML document using a graphical user interface (GUI), such as Microsoft FrontPage, often similar to word processors. The editor renders the document rather than showing the code, so authors do not require extensive knowledge of HTML.

The WYSIWYG editing model has been criticized, primarily because of the low quality of the generated code; there are various developers advocating a change to the WYSIWYM model (what you see is what you mean).

External links

• https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/HTMLPlus/htmlplus_1.html

See also

• Breadcrumb navigation
• Cellpadding
• Comparison of HTML parsers
• Dynamic web page
• HTML Application
• List of document markup languages
• List of XML and HTML character entity references
• Microdata (HTML)
• Microformat
• Polyglot markup
• Semantic HTML
• W3C (X)HTML Validator
• Web colors

External links

• WHATWG's HTML Living Standard
• Dave Raggett's Introduction to HTML
• Tim Berners-Lee Gives the Web a New Definition (archived 12 April 2011)
• List of all HTML elements from all major versions
• HTML Entities
• Sean B. Palmer. "Early History of HTML – 1990 to 1992". http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/.  (Timeframe: 1980–1995)