HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. HTML is the world's most used language for creating web pages. It provides a number of commands which are used to add and format text, pictures, and various other elements in a webpage. These commands are known as the tags or Markup.
HTML is very easy to use. Web documents are typically written in HTML using any text editors like Notepad (Windows), Visual Studio Code, Atom, Sublime Text Editor, etc.
The extention used to save an HTML document is .html or .htm
Web browsers like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Firefox, Safari etc are used to render an HTML document.
HTML Document Features
An HTML document features are:
- An HTML document is a collection of elements. Some elements are:
- Images
- Tables
- Forms
- Links using anchor tag
- Audio, video clips, etc.
Basic Structure of HTML Document
The basic structure of an HTML document has two sections:
- Head Section
- This section contains the title tag which defines the title of the HTML document in the web browser. The title is visible in the browser's title bar instead of the browser.
Some meta tags are also included in this section, which adds some additional information to the webpage. - Body Section
- This section contains all the elements which are visible in the browser window. Here, we add all the text and graphics of the webpage with some other HTML elements.
A simple HTML webpage:
<html>
<head>
<title>Title of page</title>
</head>
<body>
Hello World!
</body>
</html>- 1. HTML Tag <html>
- This tag is the always present at the top of the document, and is closed using </html> at the bottom of the document. It tells the browser that all the content inside this tag is HTML content
- 1. Head Tag <head>
- This tag creates the header of the document. This tag identifies the page heading and holds the title of the page. It is closed with </head> before the main content of the page starts. In the above example it includes the title tag, which defines the title of the document.
- 1. Title Tag <title>
- This tag contains the title of the document. The text written inside the <title> tag appears in the browser's title bar.
- 1. Body Tag <body>
- This tag indicates the body of the document. It is closed with </body> before closing the HTML tag. This tag encloses all the tags, attributes and information to be displayed in the web page.
HTML is not case sensitive. So, HTML tags can be written in small as well as capital letters.
History of HTML
| Year | Version |
|---|---|
| 1989 | Tim Berners-Lee invented www |
| 1991 | Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML |
| 1993 | Dave Raggett drafted HTML+ |
| 1995 | HTML Working Group defined HTML 2.0 |
| 1997 | W3C Recommendation: HTML 3.2 |
| 1999 | W3C Recommendation: HTML 4.01 |
| 2000 | W3C Recommendation: XHTML 1.0 |
| 2008 | WHATWG HTML5 First Public Draft |
| 2012 | WHATWG HTML5 Living Standard |
| 2014 | W3C Recommendation: HTML5 |
| 2016 | W3C CandidateRecommendation: HTML 5.1 |
| 2017 | W3C Recommendation: HTML5.1 2nd Edition |
| 2017 | W3C Recommendation: HTML5.2 |
