Chapter 2. HTML Overview

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the language that encodes World Wide Web documents. It is a document-layout and hyperlink-specification language that defines the syntax and placement of special, embedded directions that aren’t displayed by a web browser but tell it how to display the contents of the document, including text, images, and other supported media. The language also tells you how to make a document interactive through special hypertext links, which connect your document with other documents on your local system, the World Wide Web, and other Internet resources such as FTP and Gopher.

The basic syntax and semantics of HTML are defined in the HTML standard. The HTML standard and all other web-related standards issues are developed under the authority of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Standards specifications and drafts of new proposals can be found at http://www.w3.org.

The latest HTML specification approved by the W3C is HTML 4.0. The most popular browsers have implemented the new standard almost fully in their latest releases. Although some support is still buggy, very few features of the specification remain unsupported. Nonstandard extensions still exist, however, creating a few areas of incompatibility between browser platforms.

This section of the book summarizes the current state of HTML in seven chapters, as listed below. For more information on HTML, we recommend O’Reilly’s HTML: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition, by Chuck Musciano ...

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