Using HTML : Most Basic for Web Design

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a standard markup language for creating web pages and web applications. With Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Javascript it forms a triad of cornerstone technologies for the World Wide Web. Web browser receive HTML documents from a webserver or from local storage and render them into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of a web page semantically and originally included cues for the appearance of the document. - Wikipedia

These websites can then be viewed by anyone else connected to the internet. It is relatively easy to learn, with the basics being accesible to most people in one sitting and quite powerful in what it allows you to create. It is constantly undergoing revision and evolution to meet the demands and requirements of the growing internet audience under the direction of the W3C, the organisation charged with designing and maintaining the language.

The definition og HTML is Hypertext Markup Language : 

• Hypertext is the method by which you move around on the web. By clicking on special text called hyperlinks which bring you to the next page. The fact that it is hyper just means it is not linear. We can go to any place on the internet whenever we want by clicking on links. There is no set order to do things in.
• Markup is what HTML tags do o the text inside them. They mark it as a certain type of text .
• Language as it has code-words and syntax like any other language.

HTML consists of a series of short codes typed into a text-file by the site author, these are the tags. The text is then saved as a html file and viewed through a browser, like Internet Explorer or Opera. This browser reads the file and translates the text into a visible form, hopefully rendering the page as the author has intended. Writing our own HTML entails using tags correctly to create our vision. We can use anything from a rudumentary text-editor to a powerful graphical editor to create HTML pages.

The tags are what separate normal text from HTML code. We might know them as the words between the <angle-brackets>. They allow all the cool stuff like images and tables and stuff, just by telling your browser what to render on the page. Different tags will perform different funtions. The tags themselves don't appear when you view our page through a browser, but their effects do. The simplest tags do nothing more than apply formatting to some text, like this :

<strong> These words will be bold</b> and this will not.

In the example above, the <b>  tags were wrapped around some text and their effect will be that the contained text will be bolded when viewed through an ordinary web browser.

HTML is not a perfect tool for designing graphic-intensive sites or those that contain a large overall amount of information. The fact that the documents contained in a HTML stucture are static pages does not make it the tool of choice for sites that contain animation either. HTML also lacks the ability to create custom window sizes, compress files and other standard navigational controls. Distribution size is also a crucial issue because the standard HTML file format is not suited for delivering a large amount of content over a network. In addition, an HTML programmer may have difficulty dealing with a large number of HTML and graphics files at once. Certain software does exist to help deal with all of these problems.

Because of HTML's weaknesses in the area of graphic, dynamic HTML was created to enhance the capabilities in Web Page design. One of the key design goals in creating dynamic HTM was easing the complexities involved in interactive multimedia presentations on the web. An important part of that goal was building the necessary support framework into the browser. The result is that you don't have to rely on controls, plug-ins or other helper applications to achive special effects, animation, or anything else that dynamic HTML enables.

In additional to dynamic HTM and other advancements in that area, there are several other tools that were designed to directly complete with HHTML. One such tool is Java, which is hailed as a complete programming language, with many features that are compatible with other applications. Another inovation is eXtensible Markup Language (XML) that allows for standardized exchange of informtion betweed computer. XML is being touted as the next big internet standard, the heir apparent to the HTML throne. It is still an evolving tool that has a maximum potential which remains to be seen. Another tool known as XHTML is also being developed. It is a version of HTML that is based on XML.

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, name, URLs, numbers, units of lenght, languages, media descriptors, colors, character encodings, dates and times and so on. All of these data types are specializations of character data.

HTML documents also required to star with a Document Type Declaration. In browsers, the doctype helps to define the rendering mode, particulary whether to use quirks mode. The original purpose of the doctype was to enable parsing and validation of HTM 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 confroming to such a DTD. Browser, on the other hand, do no implement HTML as an application of SGML and by consequence do not read the DTD.

HTML5 does not define a DTD, therefore int HTML5 the doctype declaration is simpler and shorter :

<!DOCTYPE html>

an example of an HTML 4 doctype :

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W#C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" 

"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

This declaration references the DTD the "strict" version of HTML 4.01. SGML-based valdators read the DTD in order to properly parse the document and to perform validation. In modern browserm a valid doctype activates standards mode as opposed to quirks mode.

HTML5 VARIATIONS

• WHATWG HTML vs HTML5

The WHATWG considers their work as living standard HTML for what constitutes the state of the art in mojor browser implementations by Apple, Google, Mozilla, Opera and others. HTML5 is specified by HTML working group of the W3C following the W3C process.As of 2013 both spesifications are similiar and mostly derived from each other, the work on HTML5 started with an older WHATWG draft, and later the WHATWG living standard was based on HTML5 draft in 2011.

• HYPRTEXT FEATURES NOT IN HTML

HTML lacks some of the features found in earlier hypertext systems, such as source tracking, fat links and others. Even some hypertext features that were in early version of HTML have beed ignored by most popular web browser until recently, such as the link element and in-browser web page editing.

Sometimes web services or browser manufacturers remedy these shortcomings. For instance, wikis and contents managament systems allow surfers to edit the web pages thet visit.

• WYSIWYG EDITORS

There are some WYSIWYG editors, in which the user lays out everything as it is to appear in the HTML document using a graphical user interface (gui), often similiar to words processors. The editor renders the document rather that show the code, so authors do not require entensivve knoledge HTML.

WYSIWYG editors remain a controvercial topic because of their perceived flaws such as :

• Relying mainly on layout as opposed to meaning, often using markup that does not convey the intended meaning but simply copies the layout.
• Often producing extemely verbose and redundant code that fails to make use of the cascading nature of HTML and CSS.
• Often producing ungrammatical markup, called tag soup or semantically incorrect markup (such as <em> for italich).
• As a gread deal of the information in HTML documents is not in the layout, the model has been criticized for its "what you see is all you get" - nature.