MDN / HTML
MDN / HTML
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a descriptive language that specifies webpage structure.
Brief history
In 1990, as part of his vision of the , Tim Berners-Lee defined the concept of , which Berners-Lee formalized the following year through a markup mainly based on . The began formally specifying HTML in 1993, and after several drafts released version 2.0 in 1995. In 1994 Berners-Lee founded the to develop the Web. In 1996, the W3C took over the HTML work and published the HTML 3.2 recommendation a year later. HTML 4.0 was released in 1999 and became an standard in 2000.
At that time, the W3C nearly abandoned HTML in favor of , prompting the founding of an independent group called in 2004. Thanks to WHATWG, work on HTML continued: the two organizations released the first draft of in 2008 and an official standard in 2014. The term “HTML5” is just a buzzword referring to modern web technologies which are part of the HTML Living Standard.
Concept and syntax
An HTML document is a plaintext document structured with . Elements are surrounded by matching opening and closing . Each tag begins and ends with angle brackets (<>). There are a few empty or void elements that cannot enclose any text, for instance <img>.
You can extend HTML tags with , which provide additional information affecting how the browser interprets the element:
Detail of the structure of an HTML element
An HTML file is normally saved with an .htm or .html extension, served by a , and can be rendered by any .