The World Wide Web Consortium publishes reference material on HTML, including a definition of the commonly used HTML-2.0 and HTML-3.2 standards, used for this courseware, and of the new HTML-4.0 standard.
The basic elements in HTML are tags, which give meaning to the text embedded within the begin and end tags. For instance, all nodes of this course have a "title" tag, encoded as
<title>Hypermedia Structures and Systems</title>
.
All HTML commands must go inside the brackets <
and >
, except for special characters, for which an
ampersand is used. For instance, ë is a code that generates the
ë symbol.
The most important HTML tag is the anchor. An anchor is the starting point for a link to another node. HTML allows for links to other HTML nodes, on the same computer or any other Internet site, and also allows for links to other information services, like the popular Gopher servers. The anchor for the link leading to this node looks like:
<a href="about-html.html">HTML</a>
.
This is a simple anchor leading to a node that is located on
the same computer as the previous one, and even in the same directory.
More complicated anchors may show the complete
URL of their destination,
which indicates the protocol to use,
the Internet host to retrieve the node from, and a complete path
for the file containing the node.