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HTML

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
HTML
(HyperText Markup Language)
Filename extension.html, .htm
Internet media typetext/html
Type codeTEXT
Uniform Type Identifier (UTI)public.html
Developed byWorld Wide Web Consortium & WHATWG
Type of formatMarkup language
Extended fromSGML
Extended toXHTML
StandardISO/IEC 15445
W3C HTML 4.01
W3C HTML 5 (draft)

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language used to create web pages. It was created in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web.[1] Webpages can include writing, links, pictures, and even sound and video. HTML tells web browsers what webpages should look like. HTML also adds meta information to webpages. Meta information is information about a webpage e.g., the name of the person who created the page. Web browsers usually do not show meta information.

HTML is often used with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript. CSS is used to change the way HTML looks. JavaScript tells websites how to behave. It can also change HTML and CSS.

HTML is made by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). There are many versions of HTML. As of September 2018, the current standard of HTML is called HTML 5 and is specifically at version 5.2.

HTML uses "elements" to let the browser know how a webpage is made of. Elements are shown as "tags" in the code, written with angle brackets: <example>. Tags usually come in pairs: an opening tag defines the start of a block of content and a closing tag defines the end of that block of content. There are many kinds of tags, and each one has a different purpose. See Basic HTML Tags below for tag examples.

Some tags only work in certain browsers. For example, the <menuitem> tag, which was used to make something appear when the person presses the right button of the mouse, only worked on the Mozilla Firefox browser until version 85.[2] Other browsers simply ignore this tag and display the writing normally. Many web page creators avoid using these "non-standard" tags because they want their pages to look the same with all browsers.

Here is an example page in HTML with "Hello world!".

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Hi!</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Hello world!</p>
  </body>
</html>

The Text between <html> and </html> describes the web page, and the text between <body> and </body> is the page content. <title>This is a title</title> defines the browser page title.

Example HTML tags

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Here are some example HTML tags: [note 1]

Tag name Name Function Code Example
<!DOCTYPE> Doctype Defines the Document type
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html> HTML Defines an HTML document and starts an HTML document.
<html>All code</html>
<head> Head Contains any code that is not used to display elements on the webpage
<head></head>
<title> Title Defines the title of the webpage (shown on the tab) and is entered within the <head>
<title>Webpage</title>
<body> Body Contains the visible elements of the webpage.
<body>Html tags</body>
<h1> to <h6> Headings Headings of various sizes (<h1> being the largest)
<h1>Heading</h1>
<p> Paragraph Defines a paragraph of text
<p>TEXT</p>
<a> Anchor Creates active links to other web pages
<a href="www.domain.com">Visit our site</a>
<img> Image Displays an image on the page
<img src="ImageUrl" alt="Text displayed if image is not available">
<br> Break Inserts a single line break
Text <br> Text
 
<center> Center Moves content to the center of the page
<center>Code</center>
<script> Script Creates a script in the webpage, usually written in JavaScript
<script>alert("Hello World!")</script>
  1. There is a full list of HTML elements here:[3]

References

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  1. singhal, tanu (2023-05-18). "Does HTML is a programming language or a markup language? - CoderShot". codershot. Retrieved 2023-05-20.
  2. "MDN Web Docs". 2019-12-25. Retrieved 2020-01-15.
  3. "HTML elements reference". MDN. Retrieved 6 August 2020.