HTML by George Hernandez

!-- (HTML comment) | !DOCTYPE | a | abbr | acronym | address | applet | area | b | base | basefont | bdo | big | blockquote | body | br | button | caption | center | cite | code | col | colgroup | dd | del | dfn | dir | div | dl | dt | em | fieldset | font | form | frame | frameset | h1 | h2 | h3 | h4 | h5 | h6 | head | hr | html | i | iframe | img | input | ins | isindex | kbd | label | legend | li | link | map | menu | meta | noframes | noscript | object | ol | optgroup | option | p | param | pre | q | s | samp | script | select | small | span | strike | strong | style | sub | sup | table | tbody | td | textarea | tfoot | th | thead | title | tr | tt | u | ul | var

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a non-proprietary format for structuring plain text documents so they can be presented on the Web. A pure HTML document is just a plain text file with an extension of .htm or .html. Typically a web server spits out HTML documents to be viewed by users with web browsers and some sort of connection to the web server. An HTML document presents information with text or objects that can lead to other information via URLs.

Here are a few info bites about HTML:

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is RFC 1866, the programming language of the WWW.
HTML 0.0 was developed by Berners-Lee in 1990. The major versions of HTML (i.e. W3C Recommendations) include HTML 2.0 in 1994, HTML 3.2 in 1996, HTML 4.0 in 1997, and HTML 4.1 in 1999. HTML was reworked as XHTML 1.0 in 2000.
See the latest version of the HTML specifications at http://www.w3.org. Their material has a broad range of technical difficulty.
HTML is a specific implementation of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) for the WWW. Here are other implementations of SGML:
- XML (eXtensible Markup Language). XML was approved by W3C in February 1998. XML is a text-based format designed especially to transmit and store data. Whereas HTML has pre-established tags, XML has customizable tags/elements (hence the term "extensible"). Whereas HTML is concerned with the appearance of the user interface and display, XML is also concerned with the information. XML has the some of the power of full SGML but the simplicity and portability of HTML.
- XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language) is another variation of SGML. XHTML is an official W3C recommendation as of January 2000. XHTML is a reformulation of HTML as an XML application. XHTML 1.0 may be seen as "HTML 5.0". XHTML supports all HTML 4.0 elements and attributes but they now must conform to XML rules.

An HTML document basically takes plain text and applies special formatting by enclosing portions of it in markup tags (hence the "M" in HTML). The HTML document is also able to point to other files for presentation within the document or for access by clicking on the pointer (hence the "HT" in HTML). EG:

<p>This is text enclosed in paragraph tags.</p>
<p>This text has <b>bold words</b> in it.</p>
<p>This tag presents an image: <img src="hi.gif"></p>
<p>Here is a <a href="Hello.htm">clickable pointer</a>.</p>

HTML tags are also called HTML elements, especially when used the elements are used as objects for CSS or other processes.

A page usually contains 1 document with this basic structure:

<html>
<head>...</head>
<body>...</body>
</html>

However, a page may contain multiple documents. Hence each frame object is also a window object that contains 1 document object.

<html>
<head>...</head>
<frameset>
    <frame>...</frame>
    <frame>...</frame>
</frameste>
</body>
</html>

Page Modified: (Hand noted: 2005-02-17 20:58:35Z) (Auto noted: 2007-11-17 06:40:24Z)