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HTML

HTML stands for hyper text mark up language. It is used in conjunction with the protocol http (which stands for hyper text transport protocol) for transfering information over networks. HTML is not a programing language, rather it is a layout describing language. HTML tags can provide structure to a document and describe its appearance and contain the relevant content.

It is a best practice to seperate your appearance (presentation) from your document structure and content (mark up). This allows for more efficient maintenance, and also makes the html mark up more accessible to search engines etc. This is done via cascading stylesheets or css. Ideally these stylesheets are seperate files that are loaded with an html document. This makes it so you can have one file that describes your page's appearance, and use that file across any number of pages. Then when you need to change something like a font color, you can change it in one place and it will happen for every html page using that file.

There are a variety of different types of html. They are all fundamentally similar, but different types will conform to different sets of rules. Most html documents declare the set of rules they will conform too at the very top of their document. This helps most browsers display the page as you expect among other things. For example if you view the source of this page (in Internet explorer go to View->Source) you will see the document type declaration at the top of the page as well as a link to where that type is defined.

HTML standards and the different document types are defined by the world wide web consortium (http://www.w3.org/). Most browsers are not 100% standards compliant, each having their own way of interpeting and displaying the html they are parsing. A big push is under way to bring the major browsers more inline with full standards compliance. In the mean time, it is one of the bigger challenges with web development to create content that appears as intended across all major browsers.

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