Nowadays, any web programmer can confidently answer the question: HTML - what is this extension? But not everyone is a web programmer. Surely there are people who are not yet ready to give the correct answer to such a question. Therefore, let's look at the concepts related to this, so to speak, from the beginning.

HTML - what is it?

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is a common language for marking up Internet documents (not a programming language!). Almost all web pages are created using it. The latter differ from ordinary documents containing text and other elements (images, tables) in that they contain special descriptors (tags) that are necessary for the text to be understandable by any browser. The HTML extension (or HTM) is a sign that the file belongs to the category of web documents.

HTML tags are special instructions that contain information about the structure and formatting of a web page. Each tag is included in the text inside angle brackets<>. Almost all tags are paired and contain an opening and closing part, affecting the text inserted within these parts.

Examples of using HTML tags can be seen by opening any web page in Tag View. To do this, in the browser menu you need to select the “View” - “As HTML” item. For some browsers, hotkeys also work: Ctrl + U, when pressed in a separate browser tab, the same page opens in a mode that allows you to see HTML codes.

From the history of markup language standards

There are different versions of HTML. The language is constantly being improved, so a new version is released almost every year. Different web browsers (programs for viewing HTML pages) are developed by different companies and differ in the interpretation of individual tags and their support. As a result, the same HTML code is displayed differently by different browsers, and some browsers do not understand individual tags at all.

Before 1990, hardly anyone in the world would have correctly answered the question: HTML - what is it? Documentation for this language was first published in 1991. The author, physicist Tim Berners-Lee, came up with it as a tool that allows you to turn a set of characters transmitted over the network into headings, links and paragraphs. It soon became the standard language for marking up documents on the Internet.

In its development, it has gone from the initial edition to HTML 5 and continues to improve. This language contains descriptors for both structure and formatting. Subsequently, standard CSS technology was adopted, which involves separating the formatting description into a separate CSS file, leaving the description of the document structure for HTML tags. As a result, some descriptors were no longer used.

HTML Document Structure

It is clearly regulated and must contain several mandatory tags. These include:

• Tag- type of document and its characteristics.
• Tags - indicate the starting and ending boundaries of the document.
• Tags - limit the service section of the document, which contains instructions for browsers, search robots, as well as links to files and scripts.
• Tags - to enter instructions to browsers and search robots.
• Tags - set the main title of the document; it is visible only in the top tab of the browser window.
• Tags - limit the visible part of the document.

Tags that are useful to know

The functions of commonly used tags should be understandable to any copywriter; adding them to the text is possible in any text editor. They can be used when formatting text without having a special editor at hand. The following HTML codes, in particular, are commonly used:

• - to highlight a paragraph.
• 
  text
  - to wrap text to the next line.
• highlighting in bold - to highlight in bold.
• in words-to highlight text in words.
• anchor - to insert any anchor - a word or object that initiates a transition to the link specified in the tag. Instead of the word "anchor" write "HERE" or enter any other word, phrase, object; Instead of the word “link”, insert the Internet address where the link leads.

• Heading

  - to highlight the first level heading.

• Subtitle

  - the same for the 2nd level heading, etc. up to the sixth level.

How to create an HTML file in a regular editor

A web page (that is, an HTML file) can be typed in any text editor (for example, Notepad). But all tags will have to be entered manually. The advantage of this method is the absolutely minimized code. Disadvantages - requires good knowledge of hypertext markup language and the inability to immediately see the results of your work. Therefore, this method is only suitable for creating very simple web pages.

HTML editors

Almost all specialists use special HTML editors. The most popular of them are Macromedia HomeSite and Dreamweaver MX. They allow you to automatically enter many tags, highlight text and service code elements, and immediately view the result in a special window. But these programs are paid.

For a beginner, it is better to first test your skills using freely distributed editors. The most popular of them include Notepad++, Komodo Edit, Aptana, Alaborn iStyle and KompoZer. Each of these programs has its own advantages, provides the user with greater or lesser functionality, and has its own interface. To choose the one that suits you, you need to try working in each of them. This is easy to do because you don't have to pay to try.

In addition to these editor programs, there are visual design tools (for example, HoTMetal Pro). When creating web pages, they completely eliminate the need to manually enter HTML descriptors. However, such programs produce excessively redundant code, the amount of which significantly exceeds the required minimum size. In addition, manual editing of the code is often required to bring it to the desired quality.

Familiarization with the material in this article, we hope, will allow even a novice user to have no doubt about the answer to the question: HTML - what is it?

HTML (from the English Hypertext Markup Language - “hypertext markup language”) is a standard markup language for documents on the World Wide Web. All web pages are created using HTML (or XHTML). HTML is interpreted by the browser and displayed as a human-readable document.

HTML is an application of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) and conforms to the international standard ISO 8879.

The HTML language was developed by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee around 1991-1992 at the European Council for Nuclear Research in Geneva (Switzerland). HTML was created as a language for the exchange of scientific and technical documentation, suitable for use by people who are not specialists in the field of layout. HTML successfully dealt with the complexity of SGML by defining a small set of structural and semantic elements (marked up with "tags") that serve to create relatively simple but beautifully formatted documents. In addition to simplifying the document structure, hypertext support has been added to HTML. Multimedia capabilities were added later. Initially, the HTML language was conceived and created as a means of structuring and formatting documents without linking them to reproduction (display) tools. Ideally, text with HTML markup should have been reproduced without stylistic and structural distortions on equipment with different technical equipment (color screen of a modern computer, monochrome screen of an organizer, limited-sized screen of a mobile phone or device, and programs for voice playback of texts). However, the modern use of HTML is very far from its original purpose. For example, the tag that was used several times to format the page you are reading now is intended to create the most ordinary tables in documents, but, as you can see, there is not a single table here. Over time, the main idea of ​​​​platform independence of the HTML language was given as a kind of sacrifice to modern needs in multimedia and graphic design.

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Browsers

Text documents containing HTML code (such documents traditionally have the extension “html” or “htm”) are processed by special applications that display the document in its formatted form. Such applications, called browsers or Internet browsers, usually provide a convenient interface for the user to request web pages, view them (and display them on other external devices), and, if necessary, send user input to the server. The most popular browsers today are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari.

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Possibilities

The HTML language allows you to mark up text. Including you can:
make text bold, italic or underlined;
insert special characters (non-ASCII punctuation symbols, mathematical symbols, Greek and Gothic letters, arrows, etc.);
change the typeface, size, style, font color;
align text centered, left/right, justified;
format the text as a hyperlink to another page or file;
draw a table

Later, when the need for interactivity of web pages arose, HTML introduced
Forms for the user to enter data that is later processed. Forms and other information can be processed using special server programs (for example, in PHP or Perl).
Opening multimedia files output either directly by the browser (for example, images in JPEG, GIF or PNG formats; MIDI audio files, etc.) and external applications “embedded” in the browser window (Flash animation, Java applets, etc.).

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Versions
RFC 1866 - HTML 2.0, approved as a standard on September 22, 1995;
HTML 3.2 - January 14, 1996;
HTML 4.0 - December 18, 1997;
HTML 4.01 (changes, more significant than it seems at first glance) - December 24, 1999;
ISO/IEC 15445:2000 (called "ISO HTML", based on HTML 4.01 Strict) - May 15, 2000.

There is no official HTML 1.0 specification. Before 1995, there were many unofficial HTML standards. To make the standard version different from them, it was immediately given a second number.

Version 3 was proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in March 1995, and provided many new features such as table support, text wrapping around images, and display of complex mathematical formulas. Even though this standard was compatible with the second version, its implementation was difficult for browsers of that time. Version 3.1 was never officially proposed, and the next version of the HTML standard was 3.2, which omitted many of the innovations from version 3.0, but added non-standard elements supported by the Netscape and Mosaic browsers. Support for mathematical formulas has been released by the optional MathML standard.

HTML 4.0 also contains many browser-specific elements, but at the same time there has been some cleanup of the standard. Many elements were marked as outdated and deprecated. In particular, the font element, used to change font properties, has been marked as deprecated (CSS style sheets are recommended instead).

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Prospects

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is currently developing the fifth version of the HTML5 language. A draft version of the language specification appeared on the Internet on November 20, 2007. In parallel, work is underway to further develop HTML under the name XHTML (from the English Extensible Hypertext Markup Language). While XHTML is comparable in capabilities to HTML, it has more stringent syntax requirements. Like HTML, XHTML is a subset of the SGML language, but XHTML, unlike its predecessor, is based on XML. XHTML 1.0 was approved as a Recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on January 26, 2000.

The planned XHTML 2.0 specification breaks compatibility with older versions of HTML and XHTML, something that some web developers and browser makers are not happy with. The WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) is developing the Web Applications 1.0 specification, often informally called "HTML5", which extends HTML (but also has XHTML 1.0 compatible XML syntax) to better represent the semantics of various typical pages, for example forums, auction sites, search engines, online stores, etc., which do not fit well into the XHTML 2 model.

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HTML Document Structure

HTML is a tagged document markup language. Any document in the HTML language is a set of elements, and the beginning and end of each element are indicated by special marks - tags. Elements can be empty, that is, not containing any text or other data (for example, a line feed tag
). In this case, the closing tag is usually not specified. In addition, elements can have attributes that define some of their properties (for example, the font size for the font element). Attributes are specified in the opening tag. Here are examples of HTML document fragments:
The text between two tags - opening and closing.
Here the element contains the href attribute.
Here's an example of an empty element:

The case in which the element name and attribute names are typed does not matter in HTML (unlike XHTML). Elements can be nested. For example, the following code:

This text will be bold
and this one is also in italics

Will give this result:
This text will be bold, and this one will also be italic.

In addition to elements, HTML documents also contain entities - “special characters”. Entities begin with an ampersand character and have the form &name; or NNNN;, where NNNN is the Unicode character code in decimal notation.

For example, the copyright symbol (©). Typically, entities are used to represent characters that are not in the document encoding, or to represent “special” characters: & - ampersand (&),< - символа «меньше» (), которые некорректно записывать «обычным» образом, из-за их особого значения в HTML.

A list of basic tags and special characters is given in the article HTML Elements. For a more extensive list of special characters, see the Wikipedia article: Special Characters.

Every HTML document that conforms to some version of the HTML specification must begin with an HTML version declaration line, which typically looks something like this:
"www w3 org;

If this line is not specified, it becomes more difficult to get the document to display correctly in the browser.

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DOCTYPE options for HTML 4.01
Strict: Does not contain elements marked as "deprecated" or "deprecated".
"www w3 org;
Transitional: Contains legacy tags for compatibility purposes and to ease migration from older versions of HTML.
"www w3 org;
With frames (Frameset): similar to transitional, but also contains tags for creating framesets.
"www w3 org;

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Browser wars

In the mid-1990s, the following phenomenon arose. The main browser manufacturers - Netscape and Microsoft - began to implement their own sets of elements in HTML markup. A confusion has arisen of various designs for working on the World Wide Web, available for viewing in one or another browser. There were especially great difficulties when creating cross-browser programs in JavaScript. Webmasters had to create several versions of pages or resort to other tricks. For some time, the problem lost its relevance for two reasons:
Due to the displacement of all other browsers by the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. Accordingly, the problem of webmasters became the problem of users of alternative browsers.
Thanks to the efforts of other browser manufacturers who either followed W3C standards (like Mozilla and Opera) or tried to create maximum compatibility with Internet Explorer.

At the present stage, we can note the growing popularity of browsers that follow W3C recommendations (these are Mozilla Firefox and other browsers based on the Gecko engine; Konqueror, Safari and other browsers based on the KHTML engine; Opera with the unique Presto engine). At the same time, Internet Explorer still retains its leading position.

Most users of modern computer systems one way or another come across files with the .html extension, without always thinking about what they represent. We will now talk about how to open an HTML file on a computer.

What is an HTML file?

In general, each of us sees such files almost every day when working on the Internet. They are nothing more than standard web pages created using hypertext markup based on the programming language of the same name.

Actually, the very question of how to open an HTML file comes down only to viewing its contents in the appropriate program. Many may ask about which application to use. There is nothing easier than viewing the content in the most common Internet browser.

How to open an HTML file in a browser?

Since files in this format are web pages (published or saved on a computer), in the simplest case, double-clicking on the file will open it using the Internet browser installed on the system by default.

If you need an additional solution to the question of how to open an HTML file using other means, you will need to use the right-click menu, in which you need to select another browser or a different program from it (the line “Open with ...”). With applications, everything is also simple.

How to Open an HTML File: Using Text Editors

Viewing the contents of files of this format can be done using the most ordinary Notepad, but it is better, of course, to turn to office packages.

Few users have noticed that the same Word editor, which is part of the desktop office suite, has support for HTML, even in the form of a format offered for saving. And it is in it that you can easily create a primitive web page within a couple of minutes.

How to open an HTML file in Word? As easy as pie! You need to either select the appropriate application from the context menu, or use the file menu of the program itself to do this, calling up the object opening line. The easiest way is to use the Ctrl + O key combination, then set what is required in the format selection line and use the browse button to search for the desired file.

Specialized means

But browsers are the simplest and most primitive means of viewing HTML pages. If you need to not only view, but also use editing tools for this, it is better to turn to professional utilities designed for web programming.

Among the most famous HTML editors are Sublime Text, Aptana Studio, Notepad++, Macromedia Dreamweaver, RJ TextEd, KompoZer, Comodo Edit, Vim, Fraise, PSPad and many others. In their language, HTML looks so simple that even any untrained user can cope with creating their own page written using hypertext markup in a completely elementary way. In general, by and large, you can open files of this format in any program that supports the HTML language.

Or HTML is written in Hypertext Markup Language and is the standard web page file type on the Internet.

What's in .HTML files

The idea was proposed in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee when he needed an extension that would allow browsers to read the encoding and convert it into punctuation, rich text, hyperlinks, images, videos or other media files. A user visiting a website can only see the final result of the browser's work with HTML, if it was completed correctly. The contents of the third-party file themselves can be seen using the “ View page source code».

How to open an HTML file

Any web browser - such as Yandex.Browser, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera etc. - will open and correctly display any HTML files. In other words, opening one of these documents in a browser will decipher what is written in the HTM or HTML file.

There are many programs that make it easier to edit and create HTM or HTML files. Eclipse, Komodo Edit And Bluefish are just some of the popular free HTML editors. Another popular HTM/HTML program with many additional features is Adobe Dreamweaver, however, it is not offered to users for free. To convert HTML, you can use the Convertin.io program.

To view the code in such files and make changes to it, you can use an ordinary text editor, although its functionality is limited compared to special applications. Notepad++, will probably be the most convenient option. IN Notepad, a standard Windows program, can also edit HTML format, but it is not designed for this task, making the code editing process challenging for those not very familiar with hypertext markup language.

Have you heard about html? Or maybe you've heard about html pages on the Internet? In fact, it's simple. HTML is, simply put, one of the programming languages, and not the most complex of them.

HTML is an abbreviation for HyperText Markup Language, which translates as hypertext markup language.
Content:

HTML is used to make pages on the Internet look exactly as you know them:

• beautifully designed texts,
• in bold or italics,
• just black or multi-colored,
• with active links to other pages of the site or blog,
• with, video, audio and many other interesting features.

Essentially, html is the backside of the pages of many sites. Often their beautiful design is created using the HTML markup language. Otherwise, this is also called creating pages using html layout.

Websites can also be created in other programming languages, for example, PHP.

British scientist Tim Berners Lee developed the HTML language in 1986-1991 in Switzerland. Essentially, html allows you to create simple, yet beautiful documents. Later, multimedia capabilities (video, etc.) and support for working with hypertext (for creating hyperlinks) were added to html.

Well-known browser programs were created to work with HTML, such as:

• Mozilla Firefox (Mozilla Firefox),
• Internet Explorer (Internet Explorer),
• Google Chrome (Google Chrome),
• Opera (Opera),
• Yandex browser,
• Safari and
• other.

Initially, the main function of the browser was precisely to interpret HTML code and display the visual result on the user’s monitor screen.

What is an html page?

Documents, files, pages created in the html language have the extension .html or .htm. For example, an html page (or html file, or html document) may have a name like:

• test.html,
• html,
• html or
• title.html.

Strictly speaking, test.html is the file name (or page name), where

• test is the file name, and
• .html is a file name extension (or page name extension) that is usually simply called "extension".

Nowadays, the word “format” has become a more common option instead of the word “extension”. Therefore, the expression “html format” means that the file (or page) is written in the html language and the name of such a file has the extension html. Means,

the file named test.html is in html format.

The Windows operating system hides file extensions (that is, file formats) by default. The programmers did this “not out of malice,” but in order to protect the user from thoughtlessly changing file extensions. You can make file extensions open by default. In Windows 7 to do this:

• click on the Start button,
• open the Control Panel,
• find Folder Options,
• open the View tab, scroll to the very bottom and
• uncheck the box next to the option “Hide extensions for known file types”,
• Click "OK".

Rice. 1. Open all file extensions

If you now look up and look at the address bar of your browser, you will see there the name of the page you are currently reading, and at the end of the name there is .html. This is an example of an html blog page that is posted on the Internet. Usually a blog (site) has many html pages. For example, each article on this blog is a separate html page.

There are also one-page sites on the Internet, consisting of just one html page. For example it could be

• Internet business card of a person or company, or
• a page selling a product or service over the Internet.

The HTML language is constantly evolving and today there are several versions of it, starting from HTML 2.0 on September 22, 1995 and ending with the latest version of HTML 5 on October 28, 2014. HTML 5.1 is planned for release in September 2016.

What are HTML tags?

HTML is a language for marking up documents using tags. Tags are enclosed in triangular brackets “< >" Tags can be paired or unpaired.

• For example, the “b” tag enclosed in triangle brackets makes the text bold

text in bold

The result will look like this: text in bold

• And the “i” tag makes the text italic.

text in italics

As a result we get: text in italics

• There is also a tag for breaking the string “br”.
• Using the “a href” tag, a hyperlink is highlighted.
• Tag for document title – . This is the tag that opens the document. It is paired in the sense that it requires a closing tag with a slash.
• After the title comes the main part, which is located between the opening tag and closing tag. This tag, like the head tag, is a pair: you need to open it and remember to close it.

In paired tags, a closing tag with a slash is necessary because it cancels (more precisely, correctly completes) the action of the opening tag.

There are many HTML tags, and you can easily find HTML tutorials on the Internet.

How to create an html file

It’s very easy to create an html page (or html file) on your computer and run your creation in a browser.

1) Open Notepad (a simple text editor that comes with Windows). You can find it on your computer by entering the query: Notepad in the Search bar.

2) Copy and paste the following text into Notepad:

Hello! This is my first HTML page.

Second line, hooray!

3) An important point, without which the html file will not work: in Notepad we save the file strictly(!) in html format, as shown in the screenshot. For simplicity, you can save the file to the Desktop on your computer.

Rice. 2. Pay attention to the File Type and save the file in html format

1 in Fig. 2 – Click “Desktop” to save the html file there.
2 in Fig. 3 – Open the drop-down menu opposite “File Type”.
3 – In this menu, select “All files”.
4 – enter any name (I have 001) and after the period be sure(!) enter html.
5 in Fig. 2 – click “Save”.

4) On the Desktop we find the file 001.html:

Rice. 3. Html file on the Desktop

My default browser is Google Chrome, so the file icon looks like the icon of this browser. If there is a different default browser, the 001.html file will have a different icon.

We click on the file (Fig. 3) 2 times with the mouse and as a result we see our first page in html in the browser:

Rice. 4. Checking what the html page looks like in the browser

Thus, we have a local html page in the sense that it is accessible only from your local computer. In order for the page to be accessible to others, it must be uploaded to the Internet. More precisely, place it, which is always available: 24/7/365 (24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year round). Then every Internet user will be able to see such a page.

So html is quite an interesting language, and if in the future you are thinking of creating and maintaining your own website or blog, then it is advisable to know at least the minimum set of tags used in the html language.