Bibliographic Management | Factfile

Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is a subset of SGML and controls the display of web pages (font size and type, background and text colours, use of bold and italic, and page layout, etc.). It is often referred to as the 'lingua franca' of most pages on the Internet.

The text of a document is divided into a number of elements and sub-elements, each of which is named and allocated a start and end tag, defined by paired angle brackets. Tag names can be single letters (e.g. <p> for paragraph), abbreviated words (e.g. <li> for list), single words (e.g. <title>) or several words run together without spaces (e.g. <publisherName>. The end tag has a forward slash before the tag name (e.g. </p>).

The actual data text sits between the start and end tags, for example:

	     <title>Demystifying metadata</title>
	     <p>Text of the paragraph is typed here.</p>
    

The structure also contains sub-divisions of some elements, such as ordered (i.e. numbered) and unordered (e.g. bulleted) lists. Within the list element the actual list items are repeated instances of <li>; this is sometimes referred to as 'nesting'. For clarity, it is standard practice to use separate lines for each element and where one element contains sub-elements.

		<ol>
		<li>1. Apologies </li>
		<li>2. Minutes of previous meeting. </li>
		<li>3. Matters arising. </li>
		</ol>