HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language Hypertext Markup Language) is a simple markup language used to make hypertext documents. Hypertext documents written in HTML are called HTML documents and can be independent of various operating system platforms (such as UNIX, Windows, etc.). Since 1990, HTML has been used as an information representation language on the World Wide Web, describing the format design of homepage and its links to other homepage on the www.
An HTML document (that is, a homepage source file) is a tagged ASCII text file, usually with an. html or. htm file name extension. There are three main ways to generate an HTML document:
1. Write directly (for example, with your favorite ASCII text editor or other HTML Editing tool). 2. Convert existing other format documents, such as Word documents, into HTML documents through some format conversion tools. 3. Dynamically generated by a Web server (or HTTP server) on the one side.
HTML languages are information that identifies a document's structure and identifies a hyperlink (Hyperlink) by using various tags (tags). Although the HTML language describes the structure of the document, it does not define exactly how the document information must be displayed and arranged, but merely suggests how the Web browser (such as mosiac,netscape, etc.) should display and arrange the information. The final display results in front of the user depend on the display style of the Web browser itself and its ability to interpret the markup. This is why the same document is displayed differently in different browsers.
The current version of the HTML language is 2.0, which is based on SGML (Standard generalized Markup Language, a standard Generalized markup language, a set of complex specifications for describing the structure of digitized documents and managing their content) evolved. Although the next version of Standard HTML3.0 (also known as html+) is being developed, some of the experimental draft standards have been widely used, and most excellent web browsers, such as Netscape, can explain Some new tags in the HTML3.0, so some of the HTML3.0 new tags described in this chapter have been accepted by most browsers.