Overview
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) was invented in the early 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee as a way to chunk documents into headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on. The goal was to provide a way for Berners-Lee and his colleagues to share structured information over the internet. In addition to structuring documents, HTML provided a way to link between documents using hypertext links.
Software known as a Web browser, for example Internet Explorer or FireFox, is used to display HTML documents.
See the Wikipedia for a more detailed history of HTML
Web Standards
This tutorial is intended to teach you the most recent version of HTML -- xHTML -- and all its rules. Therefore you may find that some things you have seen in other HTML tutorials have been left out, or are written in a slightly different way here. There is a reason for this - those other tutorials are teaching you an outdated, non-standard version of HTML.
Here you will learn how to structure your document using appropriate mark-up that follows Web Standards.
Separate content from design
Keep in mind that HTML was not created to "design" Web pages. In fact, what you will be making during this tutorial will likely not meet your idea of a beautifully designed Web page at all. It will, however, be a beautifully coded Web page.
Once you know how to structure your document, you can utilize a different technology, Cascading Stylesheets (CSS), to make it look beautiful. The goal is to separate structured content (created with HTML) from design (created with CSS).
