Hypertext Markup Language - An authoring language that is used to create interlinked documents on the Web.

It is the lingua franca of the World Wide Web. A standard text markup language that uses TAGS to format and label data and hypertext links. Though the W3C states otherwise, in common usage HTML is a document format and layout application that runs on the Internet.

HTML was developed at the CERN research lab in Switzerland.

Specialized computer programs called browsers have been developed to read HTML from the web and display it on computer screens as it specifies in its markup tags. A special protocol is used to transport HTML documents between servers where they are stored and browsers. It is known as HTTP or Hypertext Transfer Protocol.