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HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is widely regarded as the standard publishing language of the World Wide. It's called a markup language because it's used to mark up ordinary text so it can be read and displayed (or rendered) by a browser. HTML consists of special bits of text, called tags, that describe the appearance and structure of a Web page's content. Unlike a standard word processing document, a browser ignores extra spaces, tabs, and returns in an HTML file when the page is displayed. Additionally, special characters like © or & are rendered within your web pages by using HTML entities in your HTML.
HTML was orginally developed to display document structure, not style. "Pure" HTML tags merely specifiy the type of information that follows, not instructions for how the information should look. After a few years, however, additional HTML tags were introduced that contained explicit style instructions.
Following a few basic HTML authoring guidelines will lead to more effecitve web site design. Take a look a basic HTML example; how it displays in the browser compared to how the actual HTML is written. While HTML is now at version 4 and a mature and active web programming langauge, it is currently being reformulated as an XML (Extensible Markup Language) application. XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) is the next step in the evolution of the Internet.
Online Resources:
World Wide Web Consortium
URL: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/
The standards organization for the Web
Getting Started with HTML
URL: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Overview.html
A short introduction to writing HTML
The Barebones Guide to HTML
URL: http://werbach.com/barebones/download.html
One of the earliest references on the Web, still as useful as ever
Yale Style Manual
URL: http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/contents.html
Guidelines on a wide range of Web design issues from Yale University
Webmonkey | Authoring
URL: http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/authoring/index.html
Webmonkey has HTML resources, tutorials and articles for authors
HTML Help by the Web Design Group
URL: http://www.htmlhelp.com/
The Web Design Group's resources for building standards-compliant HTML
A List Apart
URL: http://www.alistapart.com/
For people who make websites: From pixels to prose, coding to content
A Technical Introduction to XML
URL: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/98/10/guide0.html
This introduction to XML presents the Extensible Markup Language at a reasonably technical level.
XHTML™ 1.0 The Extensible HyperText Markup Language
URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#xhtml
The next step in the evolution of the Internet
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