HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the most basic building block of a webpage and used for creating and visually representing a webpage. It determines the content of a webpage, but not its functionality.

HTML adds "markup" to standard English text. "Hyper Text" refers to links that connect Web pages to one another, making the World Wide Web what it is today. By creating and uploading Web pages to the Internet, you become an active participant in the World Wide Web once your site is online. HTML supports visual images and other media as well. With the help of HTML everyone can make static as well as dynamic web sites. HTML is the language that describes the structure and the semantic content of a web document. Content within a web page is tagged with HTML elements such as <head>, <title>, <body>, <article>, <section>, <p>, <div>, <span>, <img>, <picture>, and so forth. These elements form the building blocks of a website.

The articles here provide reference materials for web development.

  • HTML reference

    In our extensive reference, you'll find the details on each element and attribute that makes up HTML.

  • HTML guide

    For articles about how to use HTML, as well as tutorials and complete examples, check out our HTML developer guide.

  • HTML introduction

    If you're new to Web development, be sure to read our introduction to what HTML is and how to use it.

References

Block-level elements
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) elements are usually "block-level" elements or "inline" elements. A block-level element occupies the entire space of its parent element (container), thereby creating a "block." This article helps to explain what this means.
CORS enabled image
The HTML specification introduces a crossorigin attribute for images that, in combination with an appropriate CORS header, allows images defined by the <img> element loaded from foreign origins to be used in canvas as if they were being loaded from the current origin.
CORS settings attributes
In HTML5, some HTML elements which provide support for CORS, such as <img> or <video>, have a crossorigin attribute (crossOrigin property), which lets you configure the CORS requests for the element's fetched data.
Controlling spell checking in HTML forms
Firefox 2 introduces spell checking support to text areas and text fields in web forms. The user can specify using the about:config interface whether or not spellchecking is enabled and whether to check both text areas and text fields or only text areas.
DASH Adaptive Streaming for HTML 5 Video
Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is an adaptive streaming protocol. This means that it allows for a video stream to switch between bit rates on the basis of network performance, in order to keep a video playing.
Focus management in HTML
In the HTML5 working draft, the activeElement DOM attribute and the hasFocus() DOM method give the programmer the ability to have better control of the interactivity of the page due to the user's actions. For example, both of them can be used for statistical usage purposes, tracking the number of clicks on certain links of a page, measuring the amount of time an element is focused, and so forth. In addition, when combined with AJAX technology, they help minimize the number of requests to the server, depending on the user activity and the page layout.
Global attributes
Global attributes may be specified on all HTML elements, even those not specified in the standard. That means that any non-standard elements must still permit these attributes, even though using those elements means that the document is no longer HTML5-compliant. For example, HTML5-compliant browsers hide content marked as <foo hidden>...<foo>, even though <foo> is not a valid HTML element.
HTML attribute reference
Elements in HTML have attributes; these are additional values that configure the elements or adjust their behavior in various ways to meet the criteria the users want.
HTML element reference
This page lists all the HTML elements.
HTML reference
HTML is the language that describes the structure and the semantic content of a Web document; it consists of elements, each of which may be modified by some number of attributes.
Inline elements
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) elements are usually "inline" elements or "block-level" elements. An inline element occupies only the space bounded by the tags that define the inline element. The following example demonstrates the inline element's influence:
Link types
In HTML, the following link types indicate the relationship between two documents, in which one links to the other using an <a>, <area>, or <link> element.
Media formats supported by the HTML audio and video elements
The <audio> and <video> elements provide support for playing audio and video media without requiring plug-ins.
Microformats
Microformats (sometimes abbreviated μF) are small patterns of HTML for marking up entities like people, organizations, events, locations, blog posts, products, reviews, resumes, recipes, etc.
They are simple conventions to embed semantics in HTML and quickly provide an API to be used by search engines, aggregators, and other tools.
Optimizing your pages for speculative parsing
Traditionally in browsers the HTML parser has run on the main thread and has blocked after a </script> tag until the script has been retrieved from the network and executed. The HTML parser in Firefox 4 and later supports speculative parsing off the main thread. It parses ahead while scripts are being downloaded and executed. As in Firefox 3.5 and 3.6, the HTML parser starts speculative loads for scripts, style sheets and images it finds ahead in the stream. However, in Firefox 4 and later the HTML parser also runs the HTML tree construction algorithm speculatively. The upside is that when a speculation succeeds, there's no need to reparse the part of the incoming file that was already scanned for scripts, style sheets and images. The downside is that there's more work lost when the speculation fails.
Using the application cache
HTML5 provides an application caching mechanism that lets web-based applications run offline. Developers can use the Application Cache (AppCache) interface to specify resources that the browser should cache and make available to offline users. Applications that are cached load and work correctly even if users click the refresh button when they are offline.

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Guides and tutorials

HTML developer guide
MDN articles demonstrating specific techniques you can use when building Web content with HTML, as well as tutorials and other material you may find handy. The guide can provide editorial lessons, tips and information on HTML development.

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