Chapter 2. HTML Overview
Hypertext Markup
Language (HTML) is the language that encodes World Wide Web
documents. It is a document-markup and hyperlink-specification
language that defines the syntax and placement of special, embedded
directions that aren't displayed by a web browser
but tell it how to display the contents of the document, including
text, images, and other supported media. The language also tells you
how to make a document interactive through special hypertext links,
which connect your document with other documents on the network.
The syntax and
semantics of HTML are defined in the HTML standard specification. The
HTML specification and all other web-related standards issues are
developed under the authority of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Standards specifications and drafts of new proposals can be found at
http://www.w3.org.
The latest HTML specification approved by the W3C is HTML 4.01. The
latest generation of browsers have implemented the new standard
almost fully. Although some support is still buggy, very few features
of the specification remain unsupported. In the past, some browser
makers implemented nonstandard extensions that could only be used on
limited platforms. These extensions have been mostly done away with,
although some platform-specific support still exists.
This section of the book summarizes the current state of HTML in
seven chapters, as listed below. For more information on HTML, we
recommend O'Reilly's HTML
and XMTML: The Definitive Guide, by Chuck Musciano and
Bill Kennedy.
The current chapter introduces you to the background and general
syntax of HTML. It also gives a brief introduction to XHTML, the
XML-compliant version of HTML
Chapter 3 describes the syntax of HTML tags and
documents with descriptions of all the HTML tags in current use.
For authors who want to use frames in HTML, Chapter 4 covers the frame tags in more detail and shows
examples of using them.
For authors using tables, Chapter 5 covers the
table tags in more detail.
Chapter 6 covers the form tags and shows examples
of how to use them.
Chapter 7 lists common character entities
recognized in HTML documents.
Chapter 8 contains listings of valid color values
(for tags with attributes for specifying color).
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