HyperText Markup Language, commonly abbreviated as HTML, is the standard markup language used to create web pages. Along with CSS, and JavaScript, HTML is a cornerstone technology used to create web pages,[1] as well as to create user interfaces for mobile and web applications. Web browsers can read HTML files and render them into visible or audible web pages. HTML describes the structure of a website semantically and, before the advent of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), included cues for the presentation or appearance of the document (web page), making it a markup language, rather than a programming language.
HTML elements form the building blocks of HTML pages. HTML allows images and other objects to be embedded and it 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. HTML elements are delineated by tags, written using angle brackets. Tags such as <img /> and <input /> introduce content into the page directly. Others such as <p>...</p> surround and provide information about document text and may include other tags as sub-elements. Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use them to interpret the content of the page.
HTML can embed scripts written in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML web pages. HTML markup can also refer the browser to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the look and layout of text and other material. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), maintainer of both the HTML and the CSS standards, has encouraged the use of CSS over explicit presentational HTML since 1997.[2]