SERVICES | DESIGN & PROGRAMMING

HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language is designed to specify the logical organization of a document, with important hypertext extensions. It is the original programming language of the Internet. It was not designed to be the language of a WYSIWYG word processor such as Word or WordPerfect. This design choice was made so that the same HTML document could be viewed by many different "browsers", of very different abilities. HTML instructions divide the text of a document into blocks called elements. These can be divided into two broad categories -- those that define how the BODY of the document is to be displayed by the browser, and those that define information `about' the document, such as the title or relationships to other documents.

HTML is being phased out in favor of XHTML, which in turn is a bridge programming language to XML. XHTML is a much stricter implementation of HTML and allows much less flexibility in how it is written. The full implementation of XHTML will probably take a few years. It will probably also take a few years for browsers to display anywhere near uniformly.