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HTML

HTML defined

HTML

HyperText Markup Language —HTML is an example of SGML (defined by a DTD)
In practical terms, HTML is a collection of platform-independent styles (indicated by markup tags) that define the various components of a World Wide Web document. HTML was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva to make it easier for scientists to share information.

SGML

Standard Generalized Markup Language —a standard for describing markup languages, the ANSI standard derived (1980) from IBM's GML (1969).

XML

This is a streamlined subset of SGML optimized for quick parsing. It will likely be the future of the Web.

The definitions above, except for XML, are from:

DTD

Document Type Definition —this is the formal specification of a markup language written using SGML. Each version of html has a distinct DTD. (For XML either a DTD or a schema can be used.) .

"NCSA — A Beginner Guide to HTML"

Also see The W3C home page for HTML

HTML 3.2 vs. HTML 4.0

The W3C Appendix A: Changes between HTML3.2 and HTML 4.0

• There are 25 new elements, 10 elements from html 3.2 are deprecated.
• Almost all attributes that specify the presentation of an HTML document (e.g., colors, alignment, fonts, graphics, etc.) have been deprecated in favor of style sheets.
• There are new attributes for all elments, id, class and title.

HTML 4.0 vs HTML 4.01

The W3C: Changes between HTML 4.0 and HTML 4.01

• A number of small adjustments to facilitate migration to xhtml 1.0.

Xhtml

• Xhtml is html written to XML standards
• All future W3C Web standards which pertain to html will be specified in xhtml
• A very gentle introduction to xhtml from the USGS PUBS-2000 conference.
• Xhtml 2.0 is in Draft.

" Best Viewed With Any Browser" —write to standards, not to browsers.

"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."

—Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996

The USGS is a minority in the Web community in that we are an information repository.

W3C Guidelines for Web Documents — in their own words a rough set of guidelines to start out with.

Web Standards Curriculum — a list of all the articles within the web standards curriculum, which will give you an essential grounding in HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility, and the other topics you need to be a modern web developer/designer

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"Mastering a Web Site" online course Created and maintained by Lorna Schmid and David Boldt. http://water.usgs.gov/usgs/training/webmaster/html.html     Last modified: Tue Aug 9 14:27:34 EDT 2011