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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.
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