KOS 1110: December 2010

Example of HTML

"In 1980, physicist Tim Berners-Lee, who was a contractor at CERN, proposed and prototyped ENQUIRE, a system for CERN researchers to use and share documents. In 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a memo proposing an Internet-based hypertext system.Berners-Lee specified HTML and wrote the browser and server software in the last part of 1990. In that year, Berners-Lee and CERN data systems engineer Robert Cailliau collaborated on a joint request for funding, but the project was not formally adopted by CERN. In his personal notes from 1990 he lists "some of the many areas in which hypertext is used" and puts an encyclopedia first. HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. A markup language is a set of markup tags, and HTML uses markup tags to describe web pages.
HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of "tags" surrounded by angle brackets (like <html>) within the web page content. HTML tags normally come in pairs like <b> and </b>. The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag (they are also called opening tags and closing tags).
The purpose of a web browser is to read HTML documents and display them as web pages. The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page.
HTML elements form the building blocks of all websites. HTML allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. It can embed scripts in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML webpages.
HTML can also be used to include Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the appearance and layout of text and other material. The W3C, maintainer of both HTML and CSS standards, encourages the use of CSS over explicit presentational markup.
One difference in the latest HTML specifications lies in the distinction between the SGML-based specification and the XML-based specification. The XML-based specification is usually called XHTML to distinguish it clearly from the more traditional definition.

HTML	XHTML
Allows many shortcuts	Does not allows shortcuts
Optional opening and closing tag	Requires all elements to have an opening tag and a closing tag

Monday, December 20, 2010

HTML