hypertext markup language n : a set of tags and rules (conforming to SGML) for using them in developing hypertext documents [syn: {hypertext mark-up language}, {HTML}]
Hypertext Markup Language(HTML) A {hypertext} document format used on the {World-Wide Web}. HTML is built on top of {SGML}. "Tags" are embedded in the text. A tag consists of a "<", a "directive" (case insensitive), zero or more parameters and a ">". Matched pairs of directives, like " " and " " are used to delimit text which is to appear in a special place or style. Links to other documents are in the form foo where "A" and "/A" delimit an "anchor", "HREF" introduces a hypertext reference, which is most often a {Uniform Resource Locator} (URL) (the string in double quotes in the example above). The link will be represented in the browser by the text "foo" (typically shown underlined and in a different colour). A certain place within an HTML document can be marked with a named anchor, e.g.: The "fragment identifier", "baz", can be used in an HREF by appending "#baz" to the document name. Other common tags includefor a new paragraph, .. for bold text,
for an unnumbered list,
for preformated text,,
..
for headings. {HTML} supports some standard {SGML} {national characters} and other non-{ASCII} characters through special {escape sequences}, e.g. "é" for a lower case 'e' with an acute accent. You can sometimes get away without the terminating semicolon but it's bad style. The {World-Wide Web Consortium} (W3C) is the international {standards} body for HTML. Latest version: {XHTML} 1.0, as of 2000-09-10. {Home (http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/)}. {Character escape sequences (http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/ISOlat1.html)}. See also {weblint}. (2000-09-10)