HTML 4 Introduction

1
HTML 4 - Introduction

• HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is
  the standard format for documents on the World
  Wide Web. Just as Microsoft Word uses documents
  with the ".doc" format and Word Perfect uses
  ".wpd", browsers read documents with the ".htm"
  or ".html" format.
• HTML 2.0 (June 1994), is the baseline standard
  that all browsers today. A device independent
  markup language for displaying the organization
  of information.
• HTML 3.0 (1995), tags problem.
• HTML 4.9 (April 1998), a number of new formatting
  elements, changes related to scripts and style
  sheets, and several modifications to make web
  pages more accessible to people with
  disabilities.
• XHTML eXtensible Hyper Text Markup Language.
  Official W3C Recommendation on January 2000

2
HTML

• Hyper is the opposite of linear, or simply put
  "extremely active".
• Text is what you create HTML with, just like a
  word processor without all the fancy formatting.
• Mark up is the process of creating the HTML, you
  "mark it up" in a word processor. This loosely
  means, "to write".
• Language is missleading. It's not a cryptic
  computer language that you have to learn an
  entirely new alphabet to understand. It uses
  plain english. It is a language that your browser
  understands, and one that you can learn to
  understand without much effort.

3
Why XHTML

• XML is a markup language where everything has to
  be marked up correctly, which results in
  "well-formed" documents.
• XML was designed to describe data and HTML was
  designed to display data. 
• Today's market consists of different browser
  technologies, some browsers run internet on
  computers, and some browsers run internet on
  mobile phones and hand helds. The last-mentioned
  do not have the resources or power to interpret a
  "bad" markup language.
• Therefore - by combining HTML and XML, and their
  strengths, we got a markup language that is
  useful now and in the future - XHTML.
• XHTML pages can be read by all XML enabled
  devices AND while waiting for the rest of the
  world to upgrade to XML supported browsers, XHTML
  gives you the opportunity to write "well-formed"
  documents now, that work in all browsers and that
  are backward browser compatible !!!

4
The Most Important Differences between XHTML and
HTML

• XHTML elements must be properly nested
• XHTML documents must be well-formed
• Tag names must be in lowercase
• All XHTML elements must be closed
• http//www.w3schools.com/default.asp