HTML is the programming language that has been instrumental in bringing about this revolution called ‘Internet’. ‘HTML’ fascinates a lot of people. There are people who want to learn HTML in order to try their hands at developing a website on their own. For the website designers and developers, HTML is their bread and butter. They use HTML to bring websites to life. This community of programmers and developers is also in constant search of new HTML techniques that will enhance their skills further.
The use of HTML can be judged by the fact that thousands of websites are launched everyday on the internet (and all websites use HTML in some way). Another gauge of the popularity of HTML is the fact that there are several books on HTML available in the market and there are several websites that discuss and teach HTML. For example, www.html-code-pulse.be is a website that brings together all the resources and information on HTML. In fact, this website really justifies its name “HTML code pulse”.
In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages with hypertext and other information to be displayed in a web browser. HTML is used to structure information – denoting certain text as headings, paragraphs, lists and so on – and can be used to describe, to some degree, the appearance and semantics of a document. HTML’s grammar structure is the HTML DTD that was created using SGML syntax.
Originally defined by Tim Berners-Lee and further developed by the IETF, HTML is now an international standard (ISO/IEC 15445:2000). Later HTML specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Early versions of HTML were defined with looser syntactic rules which helped its adoption by those unfamiliar with web publishing. Web browsers commonly made assumptions about intent and proceeded with rendering of the page. Over time, the trend in the official standards has been to create an increasingly strict language syntax; however, browsers still continue to render pages that are far from valid HTML.
XHTML, which applies the stricter rules of XML to HTML to make it easier to process and maintain, is the W3C’s successor to HTML. As such, many consider XHTML to be the “current version” of HTML, but it is a separate, parallel standard; the W3C continues to recommend the use of either XHTML 1.1, XHTML 1.0, or HTML 4.01 for web publishing.
