Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
somewhat more precise, HTML indicates a family of formats,
with each version clarifying capabilities and providing new fea
tures. Each version is specified by the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) and represents a standard for use by all
browsers. Two versions in particularly widespread use are HTML
3.2 (version 3, release 2), developed in 1996, and HTML 4.01,
developed in 1999.
As the name “markup language” may suggest, HTML pro
vides instructions, called
tags
, within a document to specify vari
ous details of format. The first tag, at the very beginning of a doc
ument, is
<html>
The corresponding tag, at the very end of a document, is
</html>
These HTML tags tell the browser that the document uses
Hypertext Markup Language to communicate how its text and
images should be displayed. As this example indicates, HTML
tags are placed within angle brackets < >, and the starting tag
(html) has a companion closing tag (/html) with the same name
plus an initial slash character. A similar convention is followed
for a variety of formatting specifications. To denote italics, for
example, the tag <i> tells a browser that what follows should use
an italics font, while </i> indicates the italics section is over.
Some other common tags include:
<b> </b>
Use a bold font.
<p> </p>
Consider the intervening text as a paragraph
(the </p> tag may be omitted, however).
<title> </title> Placed directly after the initial html tag; use
the identified material as the title at the top of
a browser window.
<table> </table> Place what follows in tabular form.
<ol> </ol> Consider what follows as a list of numbered
items (items within the list are designated by
an initial tag <li> for “list item”).
Beyond these paired tags, HTML contains a variety of tags for
special purposes. For example, <br> specifies a break in the current
line, moving to a new line.
