Hyper Text Markup Language, or HTML, is the language of the web.

A plain text document doesn’t contain any styles (or mark up), such as this is bold, or this is italic. HTML adds the following two things:

  • Hyper linking – the ability to link a piece of text to another HTML document. This is what enables you to click on text on one web page and have that pull up another – hopefully related – page.
  • Text Formating – The ability to mark headers, paragraphs and the like.

In practice, the web relies on a number of other standards and technologies too, such as HTTP to send pages, and CSS to format them.