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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Html)
".htm" and ".html" redirect here. For other uses, see HTM.
HTML

Official logo of HTML5[1]

Filename extension
.html
.htm
Internet media type
text/html
Type code TEXT
Uniform Type Identifier (UTI) public.html
Developed by
WHATWG
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C; formerly)
Initial release 1993; 32 years ago
Latest release Living Standard
Type of format Document file format
Container for HTML elements
Contained by Web browser
Extended from SGML
Extended to XHTML
Open format? Yes
Website html.spec.whatwg.org
HTML
Dynamic HTMLHTML5 articleaudiocanvasvideoXHTML BasicMobile ProfileHTML element
metadiv and spanblinkmarqueeHTML attribute alt attributeHTML frameHTML
editorCharacter encodings named charactersUnicodeLanguage codeDocument Object
ModelBrowser Object ModelStyle sheets CSSFont familyWeb colorsJavaScript
WebCLHTMXWeb3D WebGLWebGPUWebXRW3C ValidatorWHATWGQuirks modeWeb storageRendering
engine
Comparisons
Document markup languagesComparison of browser engines
vte
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, a programming language.

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.

History
Development
Photograph of Tim Berners-Lee in April 2009
Tim Berners-Lee in April 2009
In 1980, physicist Tim Berners-Lee, a contractor at CERN, proposed and prototyped
ENQUIRE, a system for CERN researchers to use and share documents. In 1989,
Berners-Lee wrote a memo proposing an Internet-based hypertext system.[4] Berners-
Lee specified HTML and wrote the browser and server software in late 1990. That
year, Berners-Lee and CERN data systems engineer Robert Cailliau collaborated on a
joint request for funding, but the project was not formally adopted by CERN. In his
personal notes of 1990, Berners-Lee listed "some of the many areas in which
hypertext is used"; an encyclopedia is the first entry.[5]

The first publicly available description of HTML was a document called "HTML Tags",
[6] first mentioned on the Internet by Tim Berners-Lee in late 1991.[7][8] It
describes 18 elements comprising the initial, relatively simple design of HTML.
Except for the hyperlink tag, these were strongly influenced by SGMLguid, an in-
house Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)-based documentation format at
CERN. Eleven of these elements still exist in HTML 4.[9]

HTML is a markup language that web browsers use to interpret and compose text,
images, and other material into visible or audible web pages. Default
characteristics for every item of HTML markup are defined in the browser, and these
characteristics can be altered or enhanced by the web page designer's additional
use of CSS. Many of the text elements are mentioned in the 1988 ISO technical
report TR 9537 Techniques for using SGML, which describes the features of early
text formatting languages such as that used by the RUNOFF command developed in the
early 1960s for the CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System) operating system. These
formatting commands were derived from the commands used by typesetters to manually
format documents. However, the SGML concept of generalized markup is based on
elements (nested annotated ranges with attributes) rather than merely print
effects, with separate structure and markup. HTML has been progressively moved in
this direction with CSS.

Berners-Lee considered HTML to be an application of SGML. It was formally defined

as such by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) with the mid-1993 publication
of the first proposal for an HTML specification, the "Hypertext Markup Language
(HTML)" Internet Draft by Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly, which included an SGML
Document type definition to define the syntax.[10][11] The draft expired after six
months, but was notable for its acknowledgment of the NCSA Mosaic browser's custom
tag for embedding in-line images, reflecting the IETF's philosophy of basing
standards on successful prototypes. Similarly, Dave Raggett's competing Internet
Draft, "HTML+ (Hypertext Markup Format)", from late 1993, suggested standardizing
already-implemented features like tables and fill-out forms.[12]

After the HTML and HTML+ drafts expired in early 1994, the IETF created an HTML
Working Group. In 1995, this working group completed "HTML 2.0", the first HTML
specification intended to be treated as a standard against which future
implementations should be based.[13]

Further development under the auspices of the IETF was stalled by competing
interests. Since 1996, the HTML specifications have been maintained, with input
from commercial software vendors, by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).[14] In
2000, HTML became an international standard (ISO/IEC 15445:2000). HTML 4.01 was
published in late 1999, with further errata published through 2001. In 2004,
development began on HTML5 in the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working
Group (WHATWG), which became a joint deliverable with the W3C in 2008, and was
completed and standardized on 28 October 2014.[15]

HTML version timeline

HTML 2
November 24, 1995
HTML 2.0 was published as RFC 1866. Supplemental RFCs added capabilities:
November 25, 1995: RFC 1867 (form-based file upload)
May 1996: RFC 1942 (tables)
August 1996: RFC 1980 (client-side image maps)
January 1997: RFC 2070 (internationalization)
HTML 3
January 14, 1997
HTML 3.2[16] was published as a W3C Recommendation. It was the first version
developed and standardized exclusively by the W3C, as the IETF had closed its HTML
Working Group on September 12, 1996.[17]
Initially code-named "Wilbur",[18] HTML 3.2 dropped math formulas entirely,
reconciled overlap among various proprietary extensions and adopted most of
Netscape's visual markup tags. Netscape's blink element and Microsoft's marquee
element were omitted due to a mutual agreement between the two companies.[14] A
markup for mathematical formulas similar to that of HTML was standardized 14 months
later in MathML.
HTML 4
December 18, 1997
HTML 4.0[19] was published as a W3C Recommendation. It offers three variations:
Strict, in which deprecated elements are forbidden
Transitional, in which deprecated elements are allowed
Frameset, in which mostly only frame related elements are allowed.
Initially code-named "Cougar",[18] HTML 4.0 adopted many browser-specific element
types and attributes, but also sought to phase out Netscape's visual markup
features by marking them as deprecated in favor of style sheets. HTML 4 is an SGML
application conforming to ISO 8879 – SGML.[20]
April 24, 1998
HTML 4.0[21] was reissued with minor edits without incrementing the version number.
December 24, 1999
HTML 4.01[22] was published as a W3C Recommendation. It offers the same three
variations as HTML 4.0 and its last errata[23] were published on May 12, 2001.
May 2000
ISO/IEC 15445:2000[24] ("ISO HTML", based on HTML 4.01 Strict) was published as an
ISO/IEC international standard.[25] In the ISO, this standard is in the domain of
the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 (ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 34 –
Document description and processing languages).[24]
After HTML 4.01, there were no new versions of HTML for many years, as the
development of the parallel, XML-based language XHTML occupied the W3C's HTML
Working Group.
HTML 5
Main article: HTML5
October 28, 2014
HTML5[26] was published as a W3C Recommendation.[27]
November 1, 2016
HTML 5.1[28] was published as a W3C Recommendation.[29][30]
December 14, 2017
HTML 5.2[31] was published as a W3C Recommendation.[32][33]
HTML draft version timeline
October 1991
HTML Tags,[7] an informal CERN document listing 18 HTML tags, was first mentioned
in public.
June 1992
First informal draft of the HTML DTD,[34] with seven subsequent revisions (July 15,
August 6, August 18, November 17, November 19, November 20, November 22)[35][36]
[37]
November 1992
HTML DTD 1.1 (the first with a version number, based on RCS revisions, which start
with 1.1 rather than 1.0), an informal draft[37]
June 1993
Hypertext Markup Language[38] was published by the IETF IIIR Working Group as an
Internet Draft (a rough proposal for a standard). It was replaced by a second
version[39] one month later.
November 1993
HTML+ was published by the IETF as an Internet Draft and was a competing proposal
to the Hypertext Markup Language draft. It expired in July 1994.[40]
November 1994
First draft (revision 00) of HTML 2.0 published by IETF itself[41] (called as "HTML
2.0" from revision 02[42]), that finally led to the publication of RFC 1866 in
November 1995.[43]
April 1995 (authored March 1995)
HTML 3.0[44] was proposed as a standard to the IETF, but the proposal expired five
months later (28 September 1995)[45] without further action. It included many of
the capabilities that were in Raggett's HTML+ proposal, such as support for tables,
text flow around figures, and the display of complex mathematical formulas.[45]
W3C began development of its own Arena browser as a test bed for HTML 3 and
Cascading Style Sheets,[46][47][48] but HTML 3.0 did not succeed for several
reasons. The draft was considered very large at 150 pages and the pace of browser
development, as well as the number of interested parties, had outstripped the
resources of the IETF.[14] Browser vendors, including Microsoft and Netscape at the
time, chose to implement different subsets of HTML 3's draft features as well as to
introduce their own extensions to it.[14] (See browser wars.) These included
extensions to control stylistic aspects of documents, contrary to the "belief [of
the academic engineering community] that such things as text color, background
texture, font size, and font face were definitely outside the scope of a language
when their only intent was to specify how a document would be organized."[14] Dave
Raggett, who has been a W3C Fellow for many years, has commented for example: "To a
certain extent, Microsoft built its business on the Web by extending HTML
features."[14]
Official HTML5 logo
Logo of HTML5
January 2008
HTML5 was published as a Working Draft by the W3C.[49]
Although its syntax closely resembles that of SGML, HTML5 has abandoned any attempt
to be an SGML application and has explicitly defined its own "html" serialization,
in addition to an alternative XML-based XHTML5 serialization.[50]
2011 HTML5 – Last Call
On 14 February 2011, the W3C extended the charter of its HTML Working Group with
clear milestones for HTML5. In May 2011, the working group advanced HTML5 to "Last
Call", an invitation to communities inside and outside W3C to confirm the technical
soundness of the specification. The W3C developed a comprehensive test suite to
achieve broad interoperability for the full specification by 2014, which was the
target date for recommendation.[51] In January 2011, the WHATWG renamed its "HTML5"
living standard to "HTML". The W3C nevertheless continues its project to release
HTML5.[52]
2012 HTML5 – Candidate Recommendation
In July 2012, WHATWG and W3C decided on a degree of separation. W3C will continue
the HTML5 specification work, focusing on a single definitive standard, which is
considered a "snapshot" by WHATWG. The WHATWG organization will continue its work
with HTML5 as a "Living Standard". The concept of a living standard is that it is
never complete and is always being updated and improved. New features can be added
but functionality will not be removed.[53]
In December 2012, W3C designated HTML5 as a Candidate Recommendation.[54] The
criterion for advancement to W3C Recommendation is "two 100% complete and fully
interoperable implementations".[55]
2014 HTML5 – Proposed Recommendation and Recommendation
In September 2014, W3C moved HTML5 to Proposed Recommendation.[56]
On 28 October 2014, HTML5 was released as a stable W3C Recommendation,[57] meaning
the specification process is complete.[58]
XHTML versions
Main article: XHTML
XHTML is a separate language that began as a reformulation of HTML 4.01 using XML
1.0. It is now referred to as the XML syntax for HTML and is no longer being
developed as a separate standard.[59]

XHTML 1.0 was published as a W3C Recommendation on January 26, 2000,[60] and was
later revised and republished on August 1, 2002. It offers the same three
variations as HTML 4.0 and 4.01, reformulated in XML, with minor restrictions.
XHTML 1.1[61] was published as a W3C Recommendation on May 31, 2001. It is based on
XHTML 1.0 Strict, but includes minor changes, can be customized, and is
reformulated using modules in the W3C recommendation "Modularization of XHTML",
which was published on April 10, 2001.[62]
XHTML 2.0 was a working draft. Work on it was abandoned in 2009 in favor of work on
HTML5 and XHTML5.[63][64][65] XHTML 2.0 was incompatible with XHTML 1.x and,
therefore, would be more accurately characterized as an XHTML-inspired new language
than an update to XHTML 1.x.
Transition of HTML publication to WHATWG
See also: HTML5 § W3C and WHATWG conflict
On 28 May 2019, the W3C announced that WHATWG would be the sole publisher of the
HTML and DOM standards.[66][67][68][69] The W3C and WHATWG had been publishing
competing standards since 2012. While the W3C standard was identical to the WHATWG
in 2007 the standards have since progressively diverged due to different design
decisions.[70] The WHATWG "Living Standard" had been the de facto web standard for
some time.[71]

Markup
HTML markup consists of several key components, including those called tags (and
their attributes), character-based data types, character references and entity
references. HTML tags most commonly come in pairs like <h1> and </h1>, although
some represent empty elements and so are unpaired, for example <img>. The first tag
in such a pair is the start tag, and the second is the end tag (they are also
called opening tags and closing tags).

Another important component is the HTML document type declaration, which triggers
standards mode rendering.

The following is an example of the classic "Hello, World!" program:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>This is a title</title>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<p>Hello world!</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
The text between <html> and </html> describes the web page, and the text between
<body> and </body> is the visible page content. The markup text <title>This is a
title</title> defines the browser page title shown on browser tabs and window
titles and the tag <div> defines a division of the page used for easy styling.
Between <head> and </head>, a <meta> element can be used to define webpage
metadata.

The Document Type Declaration <!DOCTYPE html> is for HTML5. If a declaration is not
included, various browsers will revert to "quirks mode" for rendering.[72]

Elements
Main article: HTML element

HTML element content categories

HTML documents imply a structure of nested HTML elements. These are indicated in
the document by HTML tags, enclosed in angle brackets thus: <p>.[73][better source
needed]

In the simple, general case, the extent of an element is indicated by a pair of

tags: a "start tag" <p> and "end tag" </p>. The text content of the element, if
any, is placed between these tags.

Tags may also enclose further tag markup between the start and end, including a
mixture of tags and text. This indicates further (nested) elements, as children of
the parent element.

The start tag may also include the element's attributes within the tag. These
indicate other information, such as identifiers for sections within the document,
identifiers used to bind style information to the presentation of the document, and
for some tags such as the <img> used to embed images, the reference to the image
resource in the format like this: <img src="example.com/example.jpg">
Some elements, such as the line break <br> do not permit any embedded content,
either text or further tags. These require only a single empty tag (akin to a start
tag) and do not use an end tag.

Many tags, particularly the closing end tag for the very commonly used paragraph
element <p>, are optional. An HTML browser or other agent can infer the closure for
the end of an element from the context and the structural rules defined by the HTML
standard. These rules are complex and not widely understood by most HTML authors.

The general form of an HTML element is therefore: <tag attribute1="value1"

attribute2="value2">''content''</tag>. Some HTML elements are defined as empty
elements and take the form <tag attribute1="value1" attribute2="value2">. Empty
elements may enclose no content, for instance, the <br> tag or the inline <img>
tag. The name of an HTML element is the name used in the tags. The end tag's name
is preceded by a slash character, /, and that in empty elements the end tag is
neither required nor allowed. If attributes are not mentioned, default values are
used in each case.

Element examples
See also: HTML element
Header of the HTML document: <head>...</head>. The title is included in the head,
for example:

<head>
<title>The Title</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="stylebyjimbowales.css"> <!-- Imports Stylesheets -->
</head>
Headings
HTML headings are defined with the <h1> to <h6> tags with H1 being the highest (or
most important) level and H6 the least:

<h1>Heading level 1</h1>

<h2>Heading level 2</h2>
<h3>Heading level 3</h3>
<h4>Heading level 4</h4>
<h5>Heading level 5</h5>
<h6>Heading level 6</h6>
The effects are:

Heading Level 1
Heading Level 2
Heading Level 3
Heading Level 4
Heading Level 5
Heading Level 6
CSS can substantially change the rendering.

Paragraphs:

<p>Paragraph 1</p> <p>Paragraph 2</p>

Line breaks
<br>. The difference between <br> and <p> is that <br> breaks a line without
altering the semantic structure of the page, whereas <p> sections the page into
paragraphs. The element <br> is an empty element in that, although it may have
attributes, it can take no content and it may not have an end tag.

<p>This <br> is a paragraph <br> with <br> line breaks</p>

Links
This is a link in HTML. To create a link the <a> tag is used. The href attribute
holds the URL address of the link.

<a href="https://www.wikipedia.org/">A link to Wikipedia!</a>

Inputs
There are many possible ways a user can give inputs like:

<input type="text"> <!-- This is for text input -->

<input type="file"> <!-- This is for uploading files -->
<input type="checkbox"> <!-- This is for checkboxes -->
Comments:

<!-- This is a comment -->

Comments can help in the understanding of the markup and do not display in the
webpage.

There are several types of markup elements used in HTML:

Structural markup indicates the purpose of text

For example, <h2>Golf</h2> establishes "Golf" as a second-level heading. Structural
markup does not denote any specific rendering, but most web browsers have default
styles for element formatting. Content may be further styled using Cascading Style
Sheets (CSS).[74]
Presentational markup indicates the appearance of the text, regardless of its
purpose
For example, <b>bold text</b> indicates that visual output devices should render
"boldface" in bold text, but gives a little indication what devices that are unable
to do this (such as aural devices that read the text aloud) should do. In the case
of both <b>bold text</b> and <i>italic text</i>, there are other elements that may
have equivalent visual renderings but that are more semantic in nature, such as
<strong>strong text</strong> and <em>emphasized text</em> respectively. It is
easier to see how an aural user agent should interpret the latter two elements.
However, they are not equivalent to their presentational counterparts: it would be
undesirable for a screen reader to emphasize the name of a book, for instance, but
on a screen, such a name would be italicized. Most presentational markup elements
have become deprecated under the HTML 4.0 specification in favor of using CSS for
styling.
Hypertext markup makes parts of a document into links to other documents
An anchor element creates a hyperlink in the document and its href attribute sets
the link's target URL. For example, the HTML markup <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a>, will render the word "Wikipedia" as
a hyperlink. To render an image as a hyperlink, an img element is inserted as
content into the a element. Like br, img is an empty element with attributes but no
content or closing tag. <a href="https://example.org"><img src="image.gif"
alt="descriptive text" width="50" height="50" border="0"></a>.
Attributes
Main article: HTML attribute
Most of the attributes of an element are name–value pairs, separated by = and
written within the start tag of an element after the element's name. The value may
be enclosed in single or double quotes, although values consisting of certain
characters can be left unquoted in HTML (but not XHTML).[75][76] Leaving attribute
values unquoted is considered unsafe.[77] In contrast with name-value pair
attributes, there are some attributes that affect the element simply by their
presence in the start tag of the element,[7] like the ismap attribute for the img
element.[78]

There are several common attributes that may appear in many elements :

The id attribute provides a document-wide unique identifier for an element. This is

used to identify the element so that stylesheets can alter its presentational
properties, and scripts may alter, animate or delete its contents or presentation.
Appended to the URL of the page, it provides a globally unique identifier for the
element, typically a sub-section of the page. For example, the ID "Attributes" in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Attributes.
The class attribute provides a way of classifying similar elements. This can be
used for semantic or presentation purposes. For example, an HTML document might
semantically use the designation <class="notation"> to indicate that all elements
with this class value are subordinate to the main text of the document. In
presentation, such elements might be gathered together and presented as footnotes
on a page instead of appearing in the place where they occur in the HTML source.
Class attributes are used semantically in microformats. Multiple class values may
be specified; for example <class="notation important"> puts the element into both
the notation and the important classes.
An author may use the style attribute to assign presentational properties to a
particular element. It is considered better practice to use an element's id or
class attributes to select the element from within a stylesheet, though sometimes
this can be too cumbersome for a simple, specific, or ad hoc styling.
The title attribute is used to attach a subtextual explanation to an element. In
most browsers this attribute is displayed as a tooltip.
The lang attribute identifies the natural language of the element's contents, which
may be different from that of the rest of the document. For example, in an English-
language document:
<p>Oh well, <span lang="fr">c'est la vie</span>, as they say in France.</p>
The abbreviation element, abbr, can be used to demonstrate some of these
attributes:

<abbr id="anId" class="jargon" style="color:purple;" title="Hypertext Markup

Language">HTML</abbr>
This example displays as HTML; in most browsers, pointing the cursor at the
abbreviation should display the title text "Hypertext Markup Language."

Most elements take the language-related attribute dir to specify text direction,
such as with "rtl" for right-to-left text in, for example, Arabic, Persian or
Hebrew.[79]

Character and entity references

See also: List of XML and HTML character entity references and Unicode and HTML
As of version 4.0, HTML defines a set of 252 character entity references and a set
of 1,114,050 numeric character references, both of which allow individual
characters to be written via simple markup, rather than literally. A literal
character and its markup counterpart are considered equivalent and are rendered
identically.

The ability to "escape" characters in this way allows for the characters < and &
(when written as &lt; and &amp;, respectively) to be interpreted as character data,
rather than markup. For example, a literal < normally indicates the start of a tag,
and & normally indicates the start of a character entity reference or numeric
character reference; writing it as &amp; or &#x26; or &#38; allows & to be included
in the content of an element or in the value of an attribute. The double-quote
character ("), when not used to quote an attribute value, must also be escaped as
&quot; or &#x22; or &#34; when it appears within the attribute value itself.
Equivalently, the single-quote character ('), when not used to quote an attribute
value, must also be escaped as &#x27; or &#39; (or as &apos; in HTML5 or XHTML
documents[80][81]) when it appears within the attribute value itself. If document
authors overlook the need to escape such characters, some browsers can be very
forgiving and try to use context to guess their intent. The result is still invalid
markup, which makes the document less accessible to other browsers and to other
user agents that may try to parse the document for search and indexing purposes for
example.
Escaping also allows for characters that are not easily typed, or that are not
available in the document's character encoding, to be represented within the
element and attribute content. For example, the acute-accented e (é), a character
typically found only on Western European and South American keyboards, can be
written in any HTML document as the entity reference &eacute; or as the numeric
references &#xE9; or &#233;, using characters that are available on all keyboards
and are supported in all character encodings. Unicode character encodings such as
UTF-8 are compatible with all modern browsers and allow direct access to almost all
the characters of the world's writing systems.[82]

Example HTML Escape Sequences

Named Decimal Hexadecimal Result Description Notes
&amp; &#38; &#x26; & Ampersand
&lt; &#60; &#x3C; < Less Than
&gt; &#62; &#x3E; > Greater Than
&quot; &#34; &#x22; " Double Quote
&apos; &#39; &#x27; ' Single Quote
&nbsp; &#160; &#xA0; Non-Breaking Space
&copy; &#169; &#xA9; © Copyright
&reg; &#174; &#xAE; ® Registered Trademark
&dagger; &#8224; &#x2020; † Dagger
&ddagger; &#8225; &#x2021; ‡ Double dagger Names are case-sensitive
and may have synonyms.
&trade; &#8482; &#x2122; ™ Trademark
Data types
HTML defines several data types for element content, such as script data and
stylesheet data, and a plethora of types for attribute values, including IDs,
names, URIs, numbers, units of length, languages, media descriptors, colors,
character encodings, dates and times, and so on. All of these data types are
specializations of character data.

Document type declaration

HTML documents are required to start with a document type declaration (informally,
a "doctype"). In browsers, the doctype helps to define the rendering mode—
particularly whether to use quirks mode.

The original purpose of the doctype was to enable the parsing and validation of
HTML documents by SGML tools based on the document type definition (DTD). The DTD
to which the DOCTYPE refers contains a machine-readable grammar specifying the
permitted and prohibited content for a document conforming to such a DTD. Browsers,
on the other hand, do not implement HTML as an application of SGML and as
consequence do not read the DTD.

HTML5 does not define a DTD; therefore, in HTML5 the doctype declaration is simpler
and shorter:[83]

<!DOCTYPE html>
An example of an HTML 4 doctype

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"

"https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
This declaration references the DTD for the "strict" version of HTML 4.01. SGML-
based validators read the DTD in order to properly parse the document and to
perform validation. In modern browsers, a valid doctype activates standards mode as
opposed to quirks mode.

In addition, HTML 4.01 provides Transitional and Frameset DTDs, as explained below.
The transitional type is the most inclusive, incorporating current tags as well as
older or "deprecated" tags, with the Strict DTD excluding deprecated tags. The
frameset has all tags necessary to make frames on a page along with the tags
included in transitional type.[84]

Semantic HTML
Main article: Semantic HTML
Semantic HTML is a way of writing HTML that emphasizes the meaning of the encoded
information over its presentation (look). HTML has included semantic markup from
its inception,[85] but has also included presentational markup, such as <font>, <i>
and <center> tags. There are also the semantically neutral div and span tags. Since
the late 1990s, when Cascading Style Sheets were beginning to work in most
browsers, web authors have been encouraged to avoid the use of presentational HTML
markup with a view to the separation of content and presentation.[86]

In a 2001 discussion of the Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee and others gave examples
of ways in which intelligent software "agents" may one day automatically crawl the
web and find, filter, and correlate previously unrelated, published facts for the
benefit of human users.[87] Such agents are not commonplace even now, but some of
the ideas of Web 2.0, mashups and price comparison websites may be coming close.
The main difference between these web application hybrids and Berners-Lee's
semantic agents lies in the fact that the current aggregation and hybridization of
information is usually designed by web developers, who already know the web
locations and the API semantics of the specific data they wish to mash, compare and
combine.

An important type of web agent that does crawl and read web pages automatically,
without prior knowledge of what it might find, is the web crawler or search-engine
spider. These software agents are dependent on the semantic clarity of web pages
they find as they use various techniques and algorithms to read and index millions
of web pages a day and provide web users with search facilities withou