Introduction

HTML, an acronym for HyperText Markup Language, is the standard markup language used in creating web pages and web applications. With Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript, it forms a triad of cornerstone technologies for the World Wide Web.

History

HTML was first created by Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, and others starting in 1989. It was standardized as a recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1997, and has been subsequently updated and strengthened, with the current version being HTML5.

Syntax

HTML markup consists of several key components, including elements (and their attributes), character-based data types, character references and entity references. HTML tags most commonly come in pairs like

and

, although some represent empty elements and so are unpaired, for example <img>.

Elements

HTML elements form the building blocks of all websites. They include 'head', 'title', 'body', 'header', 'footer', 'article', 'section', 'p', 'div', 'span', 'img', 'aside', 'audio', 'canvas', 'datalist', 'details', 'embed', 'nav', 'output', 'progress', 'video', 'ul', 'ol', 'li' and many others.

Attributes

HTML attributes are special words used inside the opening tag to control the element's behaviour. HTML attributes are a modifier of an HTML element type. An attribute either modifies the default functionality of an element type or provides functionality to certain element types unable to function correctly without them.

HTML Document Structure

A typical HTML document will have the following structure:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
My First Heading
My first paragraph.
</body>
</html>

HTML Versions

Over the years, there have been several versions of HTML. They are:

HTML 2.0 – November 24, 1995
HTML 3.2 – January 14, 1997
HTML 4.0 – December 18, 1997
HTML 4.01 – December 24, 1999
HTML 5 – October 28, 2014

HTML5

HTML5 is the latest evolution of the standard that defines HTML. The term represents two different concepts. It is a new version of the language HTML, with new elements, attributes, and behaviors, and a larger set of technologies that allows more diverse and powerful Web sites and applications.