Hypertext Markup Language

<hypertext, World-Wide Web> (HTML) A Hypertext document format used on the World-Wide Web. Built on top of SGML. "Tags" are embedded in the text. A tag consists of a "<", a "directive", zero or more parameters and a ">". Matched pairs of directives, like "<title>" and "</title>" are used to delimit text which is to appear in a special place or style. Links to other documents are in the form

 <a name="baz" href="http://machine.edu/subdir/file.html">foo</a>

where "a", "/a" delimit an "anchor" called baz, "href" introduces a hypertext reference, which in this case is a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) (the thing in double quotes in the example above). The text "foo" will be the label appearing on the link in the browser.

A certain place within an HTML document can be specified by following the document name with a hash (#) and the name of an anchor at that position.

Other common tags include <p> for a new paragraph, <b>..</b> for bold text, <ul> for an unnumbered list, <pre> for preformated text, <h1>, <h2> .. <h6> for headings.

HTML supports some national characters through special escape sequences.