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Chapter 2. Making sense of HTML5

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

—Winston Churchill

HTML5 is the latest version of the HTML language—the popular text-based language used to define the content of webpages. HTML appeared on the scene in the early 1990s. In the beginning it was merely a markup language apt at describing simple documents. A markup language is a language based on a set of markers that wrap text and give it a special meaning.

Initially, the set of HTML markup elements, called “tags” or (better) “elements,” was fairly limited. It contained elements to define references to other documents and headings, to link to images and paragraphs, and apply basic text styling such as bold or italic. Over ...