Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
HTML is a text-based markup language originally designed by Tim Berners-Lee to make the creation of technical scientific documents easy to write with a text editor, and, by means of hyper-links, easy to link to other documents to produce a web of information. The markup was originally not formally defined, but was based on document archiving and exchange standard that existed at the time called Structured Generalised Markup Language (SGML). HTML borrows its tag format from SGML – specially marked-up instructions that define a document's structure (called elements) are easily separated from textual content without the need for any special binary formats. Thus some emphasized text would be marked up like ``<em>this</em>``. HTML extends the idea to structural elements ``<head>``, ``<body>``, ``<title>``, ``<p>aragraphs</p>``, headings (``<h1>``, ``<h2>``, …), lists etc.
With the invention of graphical browsers, elements for embedding images were added. When Microsoft and Netscape engaged in the so-called “browser wars”, more elements for defining text effects, and embedding multimedia into web pages were added. Eventually, a standards body called the orld Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was established and it tried to formalise definition of HTML. Initially it defined HTML as it existed at the time as a formal SGML application (HTML 3.2). Later, with HTML 4, it attempted to separate structure from presentation by introducing a separate style-sheet language called Cascading Style Sheet CSS. More recently, with the emergence of XML as an easier to use version of SGML, the W3C has tried to promote XHTML, which is essentially HTML 4 defined as an XML document type, with limited success.
In something of an industry backlash to W3C's over-formalization of web technologies as XML applications, a new body called WHATWG has proposed HTML 5 as an evolutionary follow-up to HTML 4, the language that is used (often badly) to code most of the web pages the exist in the world today.
HTML is an important component of the World-Wide Web and the formal web standard is published and maintained by the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C). There is much more to say about HTML than can comfortably be stated in a glossary so the interested reader is directed to the official documentation of HTML and to this Wikipedia article. (See also XHTML).
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