HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language used to construct online documents and is the foundation of most websites today. A markup language like HTML allows us to

• create links to other documents,
• structure the content in our document, and
• ascribe context and meaning to the content of our document.

An HTML document has two aspects to it. It contains structured information (Markup), and text-links (HyperText) to other documents. We structure our pages using HTML elements. They are constructs of the language providing structure and meaning in our document for the browser and the element links to other documents across the internet.

The internet was originally created to store and present static (unchanging) documents. The aspects of HTML discussed above were seen perfectly in these documents which lacked all design and styling. They presented structured information that contained links to other documents.

HTML5 is the latest version, or specification, of HTML. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organization responsible for developing standards for the World Wide Web, including those for HTML. As web pages and web applications grow more complex, W3C updates HTML’s standards.

HTML5 introduces a host of semantic elements. Though we discussed how HTML helped to provided meaning to our document, it wasn’t until HTML5s’ introduction of semantic elements that its potential was realized.