What is the Full Form of HTML?

What is the Full Form of HTML?

The HTML full form is HyperText Markup Language. HTML is a hypertext markup language that is used to create web pages. The HTML webpages are written in the form of HTML elements. HTML is used with CSS and JavaScript to create more interactive and attractive web pages.

As we have seen, the HTML full form is HyperText Markup Language. Let us learn about each word and its exact meaning.

Hyper Text is derived from Hyperlink, which refers to the connections between several website pages. Markup means we have to use tags to structure the layout and elements of the web pages. The language combines both the hypertext and markup feature and makes it Hypertext Markup Language.

Before learning about the history and versions of the HTML, let us first know why we need HTML in web development. We can say that HTML is the actual skeleton of a webpage. We further use CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) and Javascript to beautify and fractionalize the webpage. Without HTML, a browser would not know how to display text as elements or load images or other elements.

Let us now learn the history behind HTML. HTML was designed by the British scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee in the 1980s at the CERN nuclear physics laboratory in Switzerland. Since 1980, many HTML versions have been released, but the current HTML5 version is gaining much popularity due to the extensive features. In the later section, we will learn about the features of HTML5.

HTML enables the user to structure sections, paragraphs, headlines, links, and images for applications and website pages. HyperText Markup Language is used to display data on the internet, and HTML also helps to make the structure of the web pages so that the webpages look pretty to users.

Websites developed using HTML documents are interpreted and displayed by various web browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Safari, Brave, etc.

Example

Step 1: Before getting into the example of an HTML document, let us first know the basic structure of an HTML document.

Step 2: As we know the basic structure of an HTML webpage, let us code an example web page for better understanding.

Example:

Output:

Let us now learn how does HTML work? The web browsers render the HTML files. Browsers first read the code and then help the viewers view the webpage's content easily. The HTML pages consist of tags that serve as an element to the structure of each content, respectively. Each page can be divided into different sections (such as nav section, body section, style section, script section), paragraphs, and other structures.

HTML webpages mainly contain tags. HTML are keywords which define how a web browser will format and display the content. With the help of tags, a web browser can distinguish between HTML and simple content. HTML tags contain three main parts: an opening tag, content, and closing tag. But some HTML tags are unclosed.

To learn more about the HTML tags, refer to the article: HTML Tags - Scaler Topics

HTML Version Release Year

As we now know, the HTML is working, and HTML is in full form. Let us learn about the different versions of HTML. Initially, HTML was released in the year of 1993. Currently, the WHATWG community is working on the development of the HTML. The current version of HTML is the HTML5 version which is gaining a lot of popularity because of newly added features.

Refer to the image below to see the different releases of the HTML.

HTML vs HTML5

HTML was introduced in 1993, and HTML5 was released in 2008. HTML5 is one of the major changes in HTML. Let us learn some of the key differences between HTML and HTML5.

• One of the key differences is that HTML was not mobile-friendly, but HTML5 is mobile-friendly.
• In HTML, JavaScript is not allowed to run on the browser directly. But in HTML5, JavaScript is allowed to run on the browser directly by using JS Web worker API.
• HTML uses cookies for the storage of temporary data. On the other hand, HTML5 uses the database connected with the current webpage to store the temporary data.
• HTML runs smoothly on all old browsers. Eg: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, etc.. On the other hand, HTML5 runs smoothly on all new browsers
• In HTML, we have to use external plugins like Adobe flash reader to use audio, video*, etc. But in HTML5, we have audio and video tags.
• In HTML, we cannot get the user's true location by using a web browser. On the other hand, we can easily get a user's location using a browser with the help of JS GeoLocation API.

For a detailed explanation, refer to the article: Differences between HTML and HTML5

Features of HTML

Let us now discuss some of the features of HTML:

• HTML is quite easy to understand as HTML is mainly comprised of tags and elements only.
• Since HTML is easy to learn, we can develop websites easily using HTML.
• We can link texts, images, and other webpages to another page or website using HTML.
• We can add images, links, videos, gifs,, etc., using HTML to make the website more attractive and understandable.
• HTML is independent of the platform, so we can use HTML to display documents or webpages on any platform like Windows, Linux, Android, or Mac.
• We can combine CSS and JavaScript with HTML to make our website look more attractive and responsive.

Advantages and Disadvantages of HTML

We have discussed the HTML full form, use cases of HTML, and the features of HTML. Let us now discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages associated with HTML.

Advantages:

• HTML is a lightweight markup language.
• HTM is free, easy to learn, and easy to apply language used to develop web pages.
• HTML is supported by all the browsers like Chrome, Android, Safari, Safari Mobile, Edge (formerly known as Internet Explorer), Edge Mobile, Opera, Opera Mobile, Firefox, Firefox Mobile, etc.
• HTML is friendly with the search engines.
• HTML can be integrated with multiple languages like Javascript, Python, Java,, etc.
• HTML is optimal for various frequently changing browser windows.

Disadvantages:

• HTML is only capable of defining static web pages as it cannot be used to create dynamic web pages. We can use any programming or scripting language for dynamic pages like Javascript, Python, Java,, etc.
• With only HTML, we cannot create very attractive web pages. We need to use CSS or its frameworks for designing attractive web pages.
• HTML becomes complex to handle due to large code when we try to create a huge website.
• HTML is based on tags and elements, so to develop even a small webpage, we require so many tags.
• HTML does not make secure web pages.
• For a large website, we need to structure different pages of websites separately. So, we cannot centralize the design on the entire website.

Learn More

So, we now know that the HTML full form is HyperText Markup Language. HTML is a standard markup language that helps us to build web pages on the internet. HTML consists of a series of elements and tags that can be used as a way to tell our web browsers about the structure of our web page, like where the headings are, where the images are, where the title is, and so on.

We have also seen the features, advantages, disadvantages, working, structure, and examples of HTML.

To learn more about HTML, Refer to the article: An introduction to HTML