In 1990, as part of his vision of the Web , Tim Berners-Lee defined the concept of hypertext , which Berners-Lee formalized the following year through a markup mainly based on SGML . The IETF began formally specifying HTML in 1993, and after several drafts released version 2.0 in 1995. In 1994 Berners-Lee founded the W3C to develop the Web. In 1996, the W3C took over the HTML work and published the HTML 3.2 recommendation a year later. HTML 4.0 was released in 1999 and became an ISO standard in 2000.

At that time, the W3C nearly abandoned HTML in favor of XHTML , prompting the founding of an independent group called WHATWG in 2004. Thanks to WHATWG, work on HTML continued: the two organizations released the first draft of HTML5 in 2008 and an official standard in 2014. The term "HTML5" is just a buzzword referring to modern web technologies which are part of the HTML Living Standard .

An HTML document is a plaintext document structured with elements . Elements are surrounded by matching opening and closing tags . Each tag begins and ends with angle brackets (<> ). There are a few empty or void elements that cannot enclose any text, for instance <img > .

You can extend HTML tags with attributes , which provide additional information affecting how the browser interprets the element:

An HTML file is normally saved with an .htm or .html extension, served by a web server , and can be rendered by any Web browser .

• HTML on Wikipedia
• Our HTML tutorial
• The web course on codecademy.com
• The HTML documentation on datarist
• The HTML specification