Hypertext Markup Language

HTML for short, the most popular document format used on the Web.

Web pages are written with HTML tags (codes) embedded in the text. HTML defines the page layout, fonts and graphic elements as well as the hypertext links to other documents on the web. Each link contains the URL, or address, of a web page residing on the same server or any server worldwide, hence 'World Wide Web'. HTML is a markup language (rather than programming language) that uses a fixed set of markup tags. A markup language can also be thought of as a 'presentation language'. HTML was conceived as a simple markup language to render research documents. At the time no one envisioned web pages turning into multimedia extravaganzas.