What is HTML and What Does HTML Stand For?

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is just one of hundreds of thousands markup languages ever created by computer geeks, also the most popular one by far. Its most current version is 4.01, or HTML 4.01. A future version of 5.0 is being spun out though at W3C. It has a cousin who's also been playing around for a while, XHTML (eXtensible Hyper Text Markup Language), an XML reimplementation of HTML.

As human language creators and users, we know naturally what the subject, predicate and object is and how they are used in speeches. However to an electronic computer made of circuits and its programs, this seems to be a little beyond their capabilities.

So markup languages come to rescue. They are in essence a container of regular information - article paragraphs, human dialogs, a photo or a minute of sound recording, adding meta data about the primitive information that we are going to use with computers. Therefore, computer knows by the meta what the information is and how it should be processed in regards to our needs.

What is meta data anyway? To be simple, it's just the information of information. For instance, in the following sentence

He eats the keyboard and takes the display on his back everywhere he goes.

It seems very natural that we have here a subject (he), 2 objects (keyboard and display) and 2 predicates (eat and take), but how would a computer know that?

We tell them.

With markup language, we are going to first analyze the sentence ourself and second mark them up for computer processing.

He eats the keyboard and takes the display on his back everywhere he goes.

HTML is full of such tags as (indicating a paragraph) and Disney (creating a link to disney.com). They are the meta information telling the computer what the embraced content is. Sometimes there might be a little more meta that could be found in the tag attributes such as informing the processing agent (a computer program responsible for analyzing and parsing the texts marked up, such as Firefox, a web browser) that this table contains information in the language of French.