2.2 HTML

We've just seen how the HTTP protocol works. The server, after a browser request, sends a page. A common protocol is needed in order to have the two applications talking each other.

In a similar way, we need a common format for pages sent across the net so that site authors can create pages viewable by the multitude of existing browsers.

HTML (standing for Hypertext Markup Language) is the common format; an HTML page is a file consisting in `tags' (identified by angular brackets) and text. HTML is a mark-up language: you decide what the elements are, not how they should look. This decision is left to the browser. As an example, when you write `<h1>title</h1>' in your HTML file, you are saying that `title' is a `level 1 heading' and your browser will display it according to its concept of heading: visual browsers will use very large fonts while browsers with speech output will probably read it louder than other text.

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