The purpose of a web browser is to read HTML documents and compose them into visible or audible web pages.

The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page. HTML elements form the building blocks of all websites. HTML allows images and objects to be embedded and 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. It can embed scripts written in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML web pages. Web browsers can also refer to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the appearance and layout of text and other material. The W3C, maintainer of both the HTML and the CSS standards, encourages the [1] use of CSS over explicit presentational HTML markup.
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1 History

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1.1 Development 1.2 Version history of the standard 1.3 HTML versions timeline

2 Markup

1.3.1 HTML draft version timeline 1.3.2 XHTML versions

2.1 Elements

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2.1.1 Element examples 2.1.2 Attributes

2.2 Character and entity references 2.3 Data types 2.4 Document type declaration

3 Semantic HTML 4 Delivery

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4.1 HTTP 4.2 HTML e-mail 4.3 Naming conventions 4.4 HTML Application

5 Current variations

5.1 SGML-based versus XML-based HTML

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5.2 Transitional versus strict 5.3 Frameset versus transitional 5.4 Summary of specification versions 5.5 WhatWG HTML versus HTML5

6 Hypertext features not in HTML 7 WYSIWYG editors 8 See also 9 References 10 External links