Glossary of basic terms

Here is a of basic terms relating to web design, online and offline promotion, world wide web and information technology. Click on the links below to access the categories of your choice, you will then be presented with a choice a articles to browse through.

This is a great resource for beginners to assist you in making the right choice for your web design needs or simply to familiarize yourself with the world wide web.

HTML Tags 

HTML, short for Hypertext Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for the creation of web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document — by denoting certain text as headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on — and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded images, and other objects. HTML is written in the form of labels (known as tags), surrounded by less-than (<) and greater-than signs (>). HTML can also describe, to some degree, the appearance and semantics of a document, and can include embedded scripting language code which can affect the behavior of web browsers and other HTML processors.

HTML is also often used to refer to content of the MIME type text/html or even more broadly as a generic term for HTML whether in its XML-descended form (such as XHTML 1.0 and later) or its form descended directly from SGML (such as HTML 4.01 and earlier).

Basic features

• Structured text web pages, with visually nice formating of:
  • chapter and section headings,
  • paragraphs and text markups such as italics and bold to stress parts of text,
  • unnumbered and numbered lists,
  • tables;
• embedding of visible raster images into the text flow;
• links, that allows accessing other web pages on World Wide Web.

Various variants of HTML integrated with CSS, DOM access through EcmaScript (JavaScript and similar), allows for advanced dynamical web page design, read further on.

Definition of HTML

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language.

1. Hypertext is ordinary text that has been dressed up with extra features, such as formatting, images, multimedia, and links to other resources.
2. Markup is the process of taking ordinary text and adding extra symbols. Each of the symbols used for markup in HTML is a command that tells a browser how to display the text.

Origins

In 1980, physicist Tim Berners-Lee, who was an independent contractor at CERN, proposed and prototyped ENQUIRE, a hypertext system for CERN researchers to use to share documents. In 1989, Berners-Lee and CERN data systems engineer Robert Cailliau each submitted separate proposals for an Internet-based hypertext system providing similar functionality. The following year, they collaborated on a joint proposal, the WorldWideWeb (W3) project, which was accepted by CERN.[1][2]

At the time, HTML was not a specification, but a collection of loosely defined elements to solve an immediate problem: the communication and dissemination of ongoing research between Berners-Lee and his colleagues. Rather than reusing existing hypertext systems which were too commercial, too platform-specific, or too complicated for authors, Berners-Lee developed his own, relatively simple system. His original browsing software, a client called "WorldWideWeb", interacting with a server called "httpd", was written in November 1990 on a NeXTcube workstation, using the NEXTSTEP development environment. It tied together his inventions of a document identification system (which later evolved into the URI standard), a protocol (HTTP) for transmitting documents over a TCP/IP network, and a document annotation convention he later referred to as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML essentially grafted hypertext capability onto a homegrown SGML-like markup language, and Berners-Lee's software allowed a computer user to view and navigate between HTML documents accessed via the Internet.[3][4] His solution later combined with the emerging international and public Internet to garner worldwide attention.

First specifications

The first publicly available description of HTML was a document called "HTML Tags", first mentioned on the Internet by Berners-Lee in late 1991.[5][6] It describes 22 elements comprising the initial, relatively simple design of HTML. Thirteen of these elements still exist in HTML 4.[7]

Berners-Lee considered HTML to be, at the time, an "application" of SGML,[8] but it was not formally defined as such until the mid-1993 publication, by the IETF, of the first proposal for an HTML specification: Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly's "Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)" Internet-Draft, which included an SGML Document Type Definition to define the grammar. The draft expired after six months, but was notable for its acknowledgment of the NCSA Mosaic browser's custom tag for embedding in-line images, reflecting the IETF's philosophy of basing standards on successful prototypes.[9] Similarly, Dave Raggett's competing Internet-Draft, "HTML+ (Hypertext Markup Format)", from late 1993, suggested standardizing already-implemented features like tables and fill-out forms.[10]

After the HTML and HTML+ drafts expired in early 1994, the IETF created an HTML Working Group, which in 1995 completed "HTML 2.0", the first HTML specification intended to be treated as a standard against which future implementations should be based.[9] Published as Request for Comments 1866, HTML 2.0 included ideas from the HTML and HTML+ drafts.[11] There was no "HTML 1.0"; the 2.0 designation was intended to distinguish the new edition from previous drafts.[12]

Further development under the auspices of the IETF was stalled by competing interests. Since 1996, the HTML specifications have been maintained, with input from commercial software vendors, by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).[3] However, in 2000, HTML also became an international standard (ISO/IEC 15445:2000). The last HTML specification published by the W3C is the HTML 4.01 Recommendation, published in late 1999. Its issues and errors were last acknowledged by errata published in 2001.

Increasing strictness

Early HTML syntax rules and processing requirements were ambiguous or, by design, lenient; when confronted with unfamiliar or poorly-authored markup, Web browsers commonly made assumptions about intent and proceeded with rendering of the document.[13] This helped speed the adoption of HTML by document authors. Over time, as the use of authoring tools increased and more consistent browser behavior was demanded, the trend in the official standards has been to create an increasingly strict language syntax, demanding more precise code. Most browsers, however, continue to forgivingly render documents that are far from valid HTML.

Since the publication of HTML 4.0 in late 1997, the W3C's HTML Working Group focused increasingly — and from 2002 through 2006, exclusively — on the development of XHTML, an XML-based counterpart to HTML that is described on one W3C web page as HTML's "successor".[14][15][16] In 2007, the old HTML Working Group was renamed to XHTML2 Working Group and a new HTML Working Group was chartered to continue the development of HTML.

XHTML is a reformulation of HTML as an XML vocabulary, and can be mixed with other XML vocabularies such as SVG and MathML. XHTML served using the media type for HTML, text/html, has been embraced by many web standards advocates in preference to HTML. XHTML is routinely characterized by mass-media publications for both general and technical audiences as the newest "version" of HTML, but W3C publications, as of 2007, do not make such a claim. Neither HTML 3.2 nor HTML 4.01 have been explicitly rescinded, deprecated, or superseded by any W3C publications;[17] as of 2007, they continue to be listed alongside XHTML as current Recommendations in the W3C's primary publication indices.[18][19][20]

New development

In November 2006, the W3C published a new draft charter indicating its intent to resume development of HTML in a manner that unifies HTML and XHTML 1.x, allowing this hybrid language to manifest in both an XML format and a "classic HTML" format that is not strictly SGML-based. Among other things, it is planned that the new specification, to be refined and released from 2007 to 2010, will include conformance and parsing requirements, DOM APIs, and new widgets and APIs. The group also intends to publish test suites and validation tools.[21][22] The new HTML working group was rechartered in March 2007[23] The old HTML working group was rechartered and renamed to XHTML2 WG[24].

On 2007-04-10, the Mozilla Foundation, Apple Computer and Opera Software proposed[25] that the new HTML working group of the W3C adopt the WHATWG’s HTML 5 as the starting point of its work and name its future deliverable “HTML 5”. On 2007-05-09, the new HTML working group resolved to do that[26].