HTML

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard for documents designed to be displayed in a. It can be assisted by technologies such as (CSS) and s such as.

s receive HTML documents from a or from local storage and  the documents into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of a  and originally included cues for the appearance of the document.

Function
s are the building blocks of HTML pages. With HTML constructs, and other objects such as  may be embedded into the rendered page. HTML provides a means to create s by denoting structural for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists,, quotes and other items. HTML elements are delineated by tags, written using. Tags such as  and   directly introduce content into the page. Other tags such as  surround and provide information about document text and may include other tags as sub-elements. Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use them to interpret the content of the page.

HTML can embed programs written in a such as, which affects the behavior and content of web pages. Inclusion of CSS defines the look and layout of content. The (W3C), former maintainer of the HTML and current maintainer of the CSS standards, has encouraged the use of CSS over explicit presentational HTML as of 1997.

History
In 1980, physicist Tim Berners-Lee, a contractor at, proposed and prototyped , a system for CERN researchers to use and share documents. In 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a memo proposing an -based system. Berners-Lee specified HTML and wrote the browser and server software in late 1990. That year, Berners-Lee and CERN data systems engineer collaborated on a joint request for funding, but the project was not formally adopted by CERN. In his personal notes from 1990 he listed "some of the many areas in which hypertext is used" and put an encyclopedia first. Berners-Lee prototyped the world's first web pages on a NeXT Computer System.

The first publicly available description of HTML was a document called "HTML Tags", first mentioned on the Internet by Tim Berners-Lee in late 1991. It describes 18 elements comprising the initial, relatively simple design of HTML. Except for the hyperlink tag, these were strongly influenced by, an in-house (SGML)-based documentation format at CERN. Eleven of these elements still exist in HTML 4.