A to Z of the digital world
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.H is for HTML, (HyperText Markup Language) used to create pages on the World Wide Web. In essence, HTML is a very simple programming language, so easy you can create your own Web page in an evening, yet so flexible that in capable hands it can present an interactive dissection of a human cadaver.
"Hypertext" is defined as "human-readable, information-linked together in an unconstrained way", and was coined in the Fifties. Basically, the words and symbols in the files on each World Wide Web computer tell the browser program on your computer how to display those files, including their text and pictures.
For example, when your copy of Netscape comes across , which "turns off" that typeface.
But hypertext offers a lot more than that. What a thesaurus does for word definitions, hypertext does for any sort of text and graphics. On a Web page, certain words are highlighted - click on them, and you will jump to a different file about the same subject. So if you wanted to read more about the Cern research labs - where HTML was invented earlier this decade - you would just put your mouse over those words, click, and your computer could automatically transfer its connection to Cern's Web server.
HTML inventor Tim Berners-Lee got the idea partly from old text-based computer games of Adventure, proving computer games do have some use after all.
Given that before 1990 the Web was only an idea being discussed by scientists at the European research labs of Cern, HTML has come a long way in a short time. Further extensions are constantly being planned. Like most things in computing, it's never finished - it's just being improved.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments