Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language[a] for
documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and
structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style
Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript.
Web browsers receive HTML documents from a web server or from local storage and
render the documents into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of a
web page semantically and originally included cues for its appearance.
HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages. With HTML constructs, images
and other objects such as interactive forms may be embedded into the rendered
page. HTML 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> directly introduce content into the page. Other tags such as <p>
and </p> surround and provide information about document text and may include
sub-element tags. Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use them to interpret
the content of the page.
HTML can embed programs written in a scripting language such as JavaScript, which
affects the behavior and content of web pages. The inclusion of CSS defines the look
and layout of content. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), former maintainer of
the HTML and current maintainer of the CSS standards, has encouraged the use of
CSS over explicit presentational HTML since 1997.[3] A form of HTML, known as
HTML5, is used to display video and audio, primarily using the <canvas> element,
together with JavaScript.
