Source: The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (26 July 2010)
Hypertext Markup Language
HTML
(HTML) A hypertext
document format used on the World-Wide Web. HTML is built
on top of SGML. "Tags" are embedded in the text. A tag
consists of a "<", a "directive" (in lower case), zero or
more parameters and a ">". Matched pairs of directives, like
"" and "" are used to delimit text which is to
appear in a special place or style.
Links to other documents are in the form
foo
where "" and "" delimit an "anchor", "href" introduces
a hypertext reference, which is most often a Uniform ResourceLocator (URL) (the string in double quotes in the example
above). The link will be represented in the browser by the
text "foo" (typically shown underlined and in a different
colour).
A certain place within an HTML document can be marked with a
named anchor, e.g.:
The "fragment identifier", "baz", can be used in an href by
appending "#baz" to the document name.
Other common tags include
for headings.
HTML supports some standard SGMLnational characters and
other non-ASCII characters through special escapesequences, e.g. "é" for a lower case 'e' with an acute
accent. You can sometimes get away without the terminating
semicolon but it's bad style.
Most systems will ignore the case of tags and attributes but
lower case should be used for compatibility with XHTML.
The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the international
standards body for HTML.
Latest version: XHTML 1.0, as of 2000-09-10.
(http://w3.org/MarkUp/).
Character escape sequences
(http://w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/ISOlat1.html).
See also weblint.
(2006-01-19)
Dictionary
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