An HTML file is a text file containing small markup tags.
The markup tags tell the web browser how to display the page.
An HTML file must have an htm or html file extension.
An HTML file can be created using a simple text editor.
There are a couple of versions of HTML:
HTML is the basic language used to write web pages.
HTML is a mark up language and not a full-blown programming language, so is therefore essentially static in nature.
HTML 4.01 adopted many browser-specific element types and attributes, but at the same time began to try to “clean up” the standard by marking some of them as deprecated.
XHTML (eXtensible HTML) is a reformulation of HTML 4.0 in XML.
It is a family of DTDs and modules that reproduce, subset, and extend HTML.
Being XML means that XHTML can be viewed, edited, and validated with standard XML tools.
HTML5 is proposed to improve and standardize the HTML specifications because each browser or software had its unique way of specifying certain objects such as video and audio clips.
It is a result from the two groups: W3C, which is to establish web standards, and WHATWG, which is to develop HTML and APIs needed for Web applications.
In HTML scripts, tags are embedded in the text.
A tag consists of four components: (1) a ‘<’, (2) a directive (case insensitive), (3) zero or more parameters, and (4) a ‘>’.
Matched pairs of directives, like <b> and </b> are used to delimit text which is to appear in a special place or style.
Demonstration
The following demonstration shows how the HTML script is displayed on the Web.