HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the main markup
language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of
webpages.
HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting
of tags enclosed in angle brackets (like <html>), within the web page
content. HTML tags most commonly come in pairs like <h1> and </h1>,
although some tags, known as empty elements, are unpaired, for example
<img>. 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). In between these
tags web designers can add text, tags, comments and other types of text-based
content.
The purpose of a web browser is to read HTML documents
and compose them into visible or audible 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.
Web browsers can also refer to Cascading Style Sheets
(CSS) to define the appearance and layout of text and other material. The W3C,
maintainer of both the HTML and the CSS standards, encourages the use of CSS
over explicitly presentational HTML markup.