Hypertext Markup Language

(HTML) A hypertext document format used on the World-Wide Web. HTML is built on top of SGML. "Tags" are embedded in the text. A tag consists of a "<", a "directive" (case insensitive), zero or more parameters and a ">". Matched pairs of directives, like "" and "" are used to delimit text which is to appear in a special place or style.

Links to other documents are in the form

foo

where "A" and "/A" delimit an "anchor", "HREF" introduces a hypertext reference, which is most often a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) (the string in double quotes in the example above). The link will be represented in the browser by the text "foo" (typically shown underlined and in a different colour).

A certain place within an HTML document can be marked with a named anchor, e.g.:

The "fragment identifier", "baz", can be used in an HREF by appending "#baz" to the document name.

Other common tags include

for a new paragraph, .. for bold text,

for an unnumbered list,

 for preformated text, , 
 ..  for headings. HTML supports some standard SGML national characters and other non-ASCII characters through special escape sequences, e.g. "é" for a lower case 'e' with an acute accent.  You can sometimes get away without the terminating semicolon but it's bad style. 
The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the international standards body for HTML. 
Latest version: XHTML 1.0, as of 2000-09-10. 
Home. 
Character escape sequences. 
See also weblint. 
(2000-09-10)