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Tim Berners-Lee of MIT invented HTML with colleagues from CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, as a means of distributing nonlinear text across the Internet, called hypertext. One document links to another through pointers called hyperlinks.
The global set of linked documents across Internet grew into what is now known as the World Wide Web.
HTML
is a mark-up, or formatting language. In fact, HTML stands for
HyperText Markup Language.
You mark up text files with HTML tags so that they can be read over
by browsing software.
HTML files are plain text files that have been “marked up” with special language elements called tags, which are embedded in the text.
Tags are pieces of code surrounded by the symbols <
>
Browsers read tags when formatting HTML files on your screen.
Documents available on the World Wide Web are HTML files.
HTML language is a specific set of tags that all browsers should
interpret. HTML describes neither text or graphic elements nor their placement.
HTML only tags the content of the file with certain attributes that are later defined by
the browser.
HTML tags attribute type styles, insert graphics, sound,
and video files in the text, and create hypertext links and forms. Hypertext is the most important capability of the HTML language.
It means that any piece of text or graphic can link to another HTML document.
Hypermedia is an extension of hypertext. It includes images, video, audio, animation, and other multimedia data types, which can be incorporated into HTML documents. The Web can be accurately described as a hypermedia system.
A markup language is very different from a programming language. Program files and data files exist separately in traditional applications. In a markup language, the instructions and the data reside in the same file. In addition, HTML does not provide data structures or internal logic, as do procedural programming language such as C or Pascal.
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