HyperText Markup Language. HTML is a language that has revolutionized the Internet thanks to the ability it gives to surf. It's a markup language and not a programming language. It gives the browser instructions on how to display elements of a Web page.

          In printing works texts are annotated with symbols telling the printer such word has to be displayed in bold character or such sentence has to be italicized and so on. The HTML is based on the same system. All the symbols instructing how to display an element are put between the signs < and > and are called tags. The most famous tag is the <a> for "anchor". It is the one allowing to surf. One puts the word between a <a> and a </a> and that word becomes a hyperlink. And of course one has to indicate the url (that is an address) where to fetch the Web page one wants to have appear when the user will click on the link. For this purpose one adds a "href" (for hyper reference) to the <a> like this:

<a href="http://www.informaticinfo.com/html_demo.html">Click here!</a> and it gives this:

Click here!

What is put between the "<" and the ">" is not displayed but it gives the browser instructions on how to display it (in this case to display it as a link towards the specified url).

          There are all sorts of other tags concerning things like page display, colors, etc.

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