By Websters Dictionary's definition of HTML is a standardized system for tagging text files to achieve font, color, graphic, and hyperlink effects on World Wide Web pages. HTML is used to build web pages on the world wide web.
Per W3C.org: HTML (the Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are two of the core technologies for building Web pages. HTML provides the structure of the page, CSS the (visual and aural) layout, for a variety of devices. Along with graphics and scripting, HTML and CSS are the basis of building Web pages and Web Applications.
Since HTML is the language for describing the structure of Web pages, HTML gives web authors the means to:
- Publish online documents with headings, text, tables, lists, photos, etc.
- Retrieve online information via hypertext links, at the click of a button.
- Design forms for conducting transactions with remote services, for use in searching for information, making reservations, ordering products, etc.
- Include spread-sheets, video clips, sound clips, and other applications directly in their documents.
There are many advantages to using strictly HTML in your website design, especially, if your website will consists of less than 100 pages or less. One hundred pages is probably the limit I would recommend when building and managing a business website. Anything higher, I would recommend having a content management system (CMS). However, I would only add this CMS as an add-on to my already large HTML website - not to replace it.
Now that you know the advantages to having an HTML website, there are, what many would consider, disadvantages to using an HTML website. The main disadvantage, in my opinion, is probably control. For owners, they feel they don't have control if they don't have access or if they don't have a way to edit the website on their own. Which is why a lot of platforms became popular because "everyone" says "I want access. I want control." But in reality, most never even login to post or edit content. Anyone can learn HTML in a matter of days and take over the entire website management process and access if they really want to. Below are considered disadvantages to an HTML website:
HTML was originally developed by Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN, and popularized by the Mosaic browser developed at NCSA. During the course of the 1990s it has blossomed with the explosive growth of the Web. During this time, HTML has been extended in a number of ways. The Web depends on Web page authors and vendors sharing the same conventions for HTML. This has motivated joint work on specifications for HTML.
HTML 2.0 (November 1995, see [RFC1866]) was developed under the aegis of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to codify common practice in late 1994. HTML+ (1993) and HTML 3.0 (1995, see [HTML30]) proposed much richer versions of HTML. Despite never receiving consensus in standards discussions, these drafts led to the adoption of a range of new features. The efforts of the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML Working Group to codify common practice in 1996 resulted in HTML 3.2 (January 1997, see [HTML32]). Most people agree that HTML documents should work well across different browsers and platforms. Achieving interoperability lowers costs to content providers since they must develop only one version of a document. If the effort is not made, there is much greater risk that the Web will devolve into a proprietary world of incompatible formats, ultimately reducing the Web's commercial potential for all participants.
Each version of HTML has attempted to reflect greater consensus among industry players so that the investment made by content providers will not be wasted and that their documents will not become unreadable in a short period of time.
HTML has been developed with the vision that all manner of devices should be able to use information on the Web: PCs with graphics displays of varying resolution and color depths, cellular telephones, hand held devices, devices for speech for output and input, computers with high or low bandwidth, and so on.
An HTML 5.x document is composed of three parts:
Here's an example of a simple HTML document:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd"> <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>My first HTML document</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <P>Hello world! </BODY> </HTML>
HTML 5x extends HTML with mechanisms for style sheets, scripting, frames, embedding objects, improved support for right to left and mixed direction text, richer tables, and enhancements to forms, offering improved accessibility for people with disabilities.
This version of HTML has been designed with the help of experts in the field of internationalization, so that documents may be written in every language and be transported easily around the world. This has been accomplished by incorporating [RFC2070], which deals with the internationalization of HTML.
One important step has been the adoption of the ISO/IEC:10646 standard as the document character set for HTML. This is the world's most inclusive standard dealing with issues of the representation of international characters, text direction, punctuation, and other world language issues.
HTML now offers greater support for diverse human languages within a document. This allows for more effective indexing of documents for search engines, higher-quality typography, better text-to-speech conversion, better hyphenation, etc.
As the Web community grows and its members diversify in their abilities and skills, it is crucial that the underlying technologies be appropriate to their specific needs. HTML has been designed to make Web pages more accessible to those with physical limitations. HTML 5x developments inspired by concerns for accessibility include:
The new table model in HTML is based on [RFC1942]. Authors now have greater control over structure and layout (e.g., column groups). The ability of designers to recommend column widths allows user agents to display table data incrementally (as it arrives) rather than waiting for the entire table before rendering.
Note. At the time of writing, some HTML authoring tools rely extensively on tables for formatting, which may easily cause accessibility problems.
HTML now offers a standard mechanism for embedding generic media objects and applications in HTML documents. The OBJECT element (together with its more specific ancestor elements IMG and APPLET) provides a mechanism for including images, video, sound, mathematics, specialized applications, and other objects in a document. It also allows authors to specify a hierarchy of alternate renderings for user agents that don't support a specific rendering.
Style sheets simplify HTML markup and largely relieve HTML of the responsibilities of presentation. They give both authors and users control over the presentation of documents -- font information, alignment, colors, etc.
Style information can be specified for individual elements or groups of elements. Style information may be specified in an HTML document or in external style sheets.
The mechanisms for associating a style sheet with a document is independent of the style sheet language.
Before the advent of style sheets, authors had limited control over rendering. HTML 3.2 included a number of attributes and elements offering control over alignment, font size, and text color. Authors also exploited tables and images as a means for laying out pages. The relatively long time it takes for users to upgrade their browsers means that these features will continue to be used for some time. However, since style sheets offer more powerful presentation mechanisms, the World Wide Web Consortium will eventually phase out many of HTML's presentation elements and attributes. Throughout the specification elements and attributes at risk are marked as "deprecated". They are accompanied by examples of how to achieve the same effects with other elements or style sheets.
Through scripts, authors may create dynamic Web pages (e.g., "smart forms" that react as users fill them out) and use HTML as a means to build networked applications.
The mechanisms provided to include scripts in an HTML document are independent of the scripting language.