1 - What is the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

HTML is the acronym for hypertext Markup language: language used to encode text files for use on hypertext systems (technique that creates links between data of different types such as: text ↔ image, text ↔ multimedia file. To create a web page, at the beginning the webmasters used two software, in one they typed the HTML code in the other one they visualized the page, and certainly what they typed as HTML did not correspond to what they got as animated texts, buttons ... Today thanks to the appearance of WYSIYG software (what you see is what you get), the creation of a web page is as simple as the creation of a text document The most used WYSIWYG software is FrontPage, FrontPage express, Dreamwever, Nvu, ... A "standard" html document must start with: HTML  and be marked with /HTML :

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>
<head>
<!-- head page -->
<title>Web Page Title</title>
</head>

<body>
Page content here !

</body>
</html>

 Note

we will see in detail the structure of an html page in the later tutorials

2 - Origin of HTML

HTML is one of the three basic inventions of the World Wide Web, with Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and web addresses. HTML was invented to allow to write hypertext documents linking the different Internet resources with hyperlinks. Today, these documents are called "web pages". In August 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee publicly announced the Usenet web, he quoted only the SGML language, but gave the URL of a .html suffix document.

3 - The latest HTML5 version

HTML5 (HyperText Markup Language 5) is the latest major revision of HTML (a data format designed to represent web pages). This release was finalized by the end of 2014. HTML5 specifies two syntaxes for an abstract model defined in terms of DOM: HTML5 and XHTML5. The language also includes an application layer with many APIs, as well as an algorithm to process documents with non-compliant syntax. The work was taken over by the W3C in March 2007 after being launched by the WHATWG. The two organizations are working in parallel on the same document to maintain a single version of the technology. The W3C closes feature additions on May 22, 2011, announcing a finalization of the specification in 20141, and encourages web developers to use HTML 5 from that moment. At the end of 2016, version 5.1 is officially released and presents several new features that should facilitate the work of Web2 application developers.

In everyday language, HTML5 often refers to a set of Web technologies (HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript) allowing the development of applications (see DHTML).

Younes Derfoufi 
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