HyperText Markup Language
A Language for Transmission of Global Hyperdocuments.
Abstract
The World Wide Web project involves the processing of structured
hypertext documents by diverse systems around the globe. The hypertext
documents are represented as marked up text.
Specification
The HyperText Markup Language is defined in terms of the ISO
8879:1986, Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). The SGML declaration and document type definition
specify the syntax and structure of HTML.
Implementors' Guide
This is intended as an introduction to the language and a guide to
implementors. It does not comprise an integral part of the HTML
specification.
Introduction
Text and Markup is an introduction to SGML
text and markup as it applies to HTML. It should prepare you to read
the DTD.
HTML by Example
The following sections describe the HyperText Markup language by
example. They are organized in order of complexity, both for the human
reader and the SGML processing application.
- Recommended
- Examples of how to write HTML that won't stress
the processing software. Some things can't be done
this way.
- Complete
- Examples of all the constructs necessary to
produce HTML documents.
- Tolerated
- Examples of illegal constructs that are supported
for historical reasons.
- Deprecated
- Some quirks; these are legal SGML,
but they are likely to break existing implementations (including
the sample).
- Errors
- These are just plain broken. Implementors should use
these to bullet-proof their code.
A Partial Implementation
The libHTML software
distribution provides the primitive SGML reading functions that
you can use to build a conforming implementation.
This software is written in ANSI C (with some accomodataions for
K&R compilers). It supports the lexical constructs demonstrated in
HTML Extremes.