HyperText Markup Language, HTML, is an authoring language used to create Web documents. The document elements are edited with tags (markup codes), which define how the browser on a user’s computer is supposed to present the document. Among other things, HTML defines how and where in a document images and hyperlinks should be presented, and it specifies the layout and typography of the text. A few examples of HTML tags and the resulting presentation in a browser:

<b>Bold text</b> = Bold text
<a href="link.html">Hyperlink</a> = Hyperlink

When a browser requests a file containing HTML tags, it receives information about the contents, structure and behaviour of the document. HTML 4.0 is the latest version of the HTML language. Among other things, it supports tables, forms, scripting, multimedia, and style sheets. HTML documents are saved as .html or .htm files on Web servers. HTML is a subset of SGML, Standard Generalized Markup Language.