hypertext markup language

Noun

hypertext markup language - a set of tags and rules (conforming to SGML) for using them in developing hypertext documents

Synonyms: HTML, hypertext mark-up language

(hypertext, World-Wide Web, standard)

Hypertext Markup Language - (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" (case insensitive), zero or more parameters and a ">". Matched pairs of directives, like "" <a href=and>and</a> "" 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 "A" and "/A" delimit an "anchor", "HREF" introduces a hypertext reference, which is most often a Uniform Resource Locator (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 a new paragraph, .. for bold text,

for

unnumbered

list

 for
preformated text, , 
 .. 
 for headings.

HTML supports some standard SGML national characters and
other non-ASCII characters through special escape sequences, 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.

The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the international
standards body for HTML.

Latest version: XHTML 1.0, as of 2000-09-10.

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/.

Character escape sequences.

See also weblint.

HTML, hypertext mark-up language, markup language