HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a language to specify the structure of documents for retrieval across the Internet using browser programs   of theWorldWideWeb. Developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, HTML is short for HyperText Markup Language and is a language used to create electronic documents, especially pages on the World Wide Web that contain connections called hyperlinks to other pages. Every web page you see on the Internet, including this one contains HTML code that helps format and show text and images in an easy to read format. Without HTML a browser would not know how to format a page and would only display plain text with no formatting that contained no links. Next, the HTML tag begins letting the browser know that HTML code is being used until it is terminated at the end of the page. Next, the head section contains header information about the page, which will almost always contain the title of the page and the meta tags. Finally, the body section is all content that is viewable on the browser. For example, all the text you see here is contained within the body tags.

HTML5 is the update made to HTML from HTML4 (XHTML follows a different version numbering scheme). It uses the same basic rules as HTML4, but adds some new tags and attributes which allow for better semantics and for dynamic elements that are activated using JavaScript. New elements include section, article, aside, header, hgroup, footer, nav, figure, video, audio, track, embed (different usage), mark, progress, meter, time, ruby, canvas, command, details, and output. There are new input types for forms, which include tel, search, url, email, date time, date, month, week, time, datetime-local, number, range, and color.

A number of elements have been removed due to being presentational elements, accessibility issues, or lack of use. These should no longer be used: basefont, big, center, font, strike, frame, frameset, noframes, acronym, applet, is index, and dir.