The WorldWideWeb system uses marked-up text to represent a hypertext document for transmission over the network. The hypertext mark-up language is an SGML format.
A key feature of the WWW is that parsers should ignore tags and attributes which they do not understand. This allows the language to evolve while maintaining backward compatibility.
Technical Specifications
- Default text
- How text is interpreted when uninfluenced by tags.
- The tags
- A list of the tags used in HTML with their significance.
- Entities
- Special characters are represented by SGML entities.
- DTD
- The SGML document type definition for HTML.
Additional Resources
- Example
- A file containing a variety of tags used for test purposes. See also finding examples on the web.
- Future directions
- Changes suggested for HTML improvements.
- Constraints
- Design constraints for HTML which might explain some of its properties.
Community Standards
A new specification is currently being edited by Dan Connolly. Comments should be directed to the World Wide Web project mailing list.