Background on HTML

Hypertext Markup Language. HTML is a markup language used to create hypertext documents that are platform independent. HTML documents are SGML documents with generic semantics that are appropriate for representing information from a wide range of domains. HTML markup can represent hypertext news, mail, documentation, and hypermedia; menus of options; database query results; simple structured documents with in-lined graphics; and hypertext views of existing bodies of information.

HTML 3.2 is W3C's new specification for HTML, developed together with vendors including IBM, Microsoft, Netscape Communications Corporation, Novell, SoftQuad, Spyglass, and Sun Microsystems. HTML 3.2 aims to capture recommended practice as of early '96 and as such to be used as a replacement for HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866). HTML 3.2 adds widely deployed features such as tables, applets and text flow around images, while providing backwards compatibility with the existing standard HTML 2.0.

HTML 3.2 extends the existing Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard HTML 2.0 with ideas from several sources. The W3C's Editorial Review Board (ERB) incorporated designs from the HTML+ and HTML 3.0 proposals by Dave Raggett.

The original HTML specification was written by Tim Berners-Lee, Director of W3C, while he was at CERN. Innovations driven by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Mosaic team and many other contributors were incorporated by an IETF working group, leading to the HTML 2.0 specification (Request For Comments #1866), edited by W3C Architecture Domain Leader Dan Connolly.

The W3C is continuing to work with vendors on extensions to future versions of HTML for multimedia objects, scripting, style sheets, layout, forms, higher quality printing, and math.

Along with the invention of a new scheme for naming any Internet information resource (URLs) and a new protocol for sending files across the Internet (HTTP), the Web needed a new data format for including links and device-independent formatting to glue it all together.

HTML uses structural markup which emphasizes the meaning of a document: "...This is the second item in a list; this is a top-level heading...". It's completely up to the HTML processor how to format the document for the recipient: as voice, as a text screen, as a graphical 'page', etc. This power comes from HTML 3.2's conformance to International Standard ISO 8879 - Standard Generalized Markup Language. Since the Web's hypertext documents are an SGML application, they are represented using text-based markup and are interoperable across a wide range of platforms.

HTML 3.2 includes features for basic document idioms such as headings, lists, paragraphs, tables and images, as well as hypertext links and electronic fill-in forms. HTML 3.2 documents are designed to be rendered in several ways: on graphical displays, text-only displays, speech-based browsers, and printed to hardcopy media. Additional HTML 3.2 features support meta-information describing link relationships and document properties such as authorship, content rating, and copyright statements.