What Is HTML?

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the universal language of the Web. It is a language for laying out pages that are capable of displaying all the diverse kinds of information that the Web contains. A web browser, at the most basic level, is a program that reads and interprets HTML.

While various software companies own and sell HTML reading and writing programs, no one owns the language HTML itself. It is an international standard, maintained and updated by a complicated political process that so far has worked remarkably well. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), at http://www.w3.org, manages the HTML standard.