Features of HTML
- HTML is a very simple language. It can be easily understood and modified.
- HTML has a lot of formatting tags for presenting the web.
- HTML is not a case sensitive language, which means we can use lower-case or upper-case for tags
- It is a markup language, so it provides a flexible way to design web pages along with the text.
- It can embed programs written in a scripting language like JavaScript.
- CSS inclusion would help to improve the layout and appearance of the content.
- HTML facilitates programmers to add a link on the web pages (by html anchor tag, <a>), so it enhances the interest of browsing the user.
- It is platform-independent because it can be displayed on any platform like Windows, Linux or Mac OS.
- It facilitates the programmer to add Images, Videos, and Sound to the web pages which makes it more attractive and interactive.
- HTML is a universal language and has become more sophisticated.
HTML Versions
HTML is an evolving language. Since the time HTML was invented in the 1990s, there are lots of HTML versions available in the market.
A Brief history about the HTML versions is given below:
HTML 1.0: The first version of HTML was 1.0, which is the basic version of HTML that has support for the elements like text controls and images. HTML 1.0 was released in1991. W3C did not exist before HTML 2.0; hence it does not show details about HTML 1.0.
HTML 2.0: HTML 2.0 was released in 1995, and it was the standard language version for website design. HTML 2.0 was able to support extra features such as form-based file upload, form elements such as text box, option button, etc.
HTML 3.2: HTML 3.2 version was published by W3C in early 1997. HTML 3.2 had many new features like tables, superscript, subscript etc. Two most important features introduced in HTML 3.2 were tables and text flow around images. This version was capable of providing support for extra options for form elements. It can also support a web page with complex mathematical equations. Today it is practically supported by most of the browsers.
HTML 4.01: version was released in December 1999, and it is a very stable version of HTML language. HTML 4.01 introduced features like scripting, style sheets, better tables, better forms frames and embedding objects. This version is the current official standard and introduced the concept of an external style sheet.
HTML5: HTML5 is the newest version of HyperText Markup language. The first draft of this version was announced in January 2008. There are two major organisations one is W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), and another one is WHATWG( Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) which are involved in the development of the HTML 5 version. The new standard incorporates features like video playback and drag-and-drop that have been previously dependent on third-party browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Google Gears.
HTML Text Editors
- An HTML file is a text file, so to create an HTML file we can use any text editors.
- Text editors are the programs which allow editing in a written text, hence to create a web page we need to write our code in some text editor.
- There are various types of text editors available which you can directly download, but for a beginner, the best text editor is Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Mac).
- After learning the basics, you can easily use other professional text editors like Adobe Dreamweaver, Notepad++, Sublime Text, Vim, etc.