About these Documents

These documents attempt to document all the HTML (Hyper-Text Mark-up Language) tags recognized by the various WWW (World Wide Web) and HTML browsers.

This information is presented in the form of a Dictionary of HTML listing every known tag and provides examples of its use in a fairly reader friendly manner.

Most of the information you will find here was; discovered accidentally, synthesized through the scrupulous examination of browser code, condensed by filtering of other HTML documents and through the contributions of a few generous people on the net.

I make no guarantees about the quality or accuracy of the information provided to you. These documents were primarily put together for my own use. It just so happens that I think this is important enough to share.

Examples are not always provided. In case of confusion please look at the source of this document.

PS, the artwork (or lack of it) is all by me

Contributors

Thanks goes out to the following generous people who have contributed to make this document better.

Eric Hall Ford Motor Co

Example PERL scripts.

Roger Binns IXI

For spreading these documents through IXI.

Daniel LaLiberte NCSA

Pointing out the typos, being suggestive and placing the document on ncsa servers.

Keith Blow Home

Clearing out the fuzzy descriptions in form processing.

Mark Meytin eats.com

making these documents available on the net.

Simon north knoware.nl

ISO-8859-1 details to the special characters supported by HTML
the relationship between HTML and SGML
HEAD BODY and the structure of a HTML document

History

Version 3.4: A set of perl scripts is provided to interface with a free text searching engine. Yet more reorganizing. Java,netscape and perl have their own sub-directories. Maintaining links a big problem as these documents are crafted entirely by hand.. MISC book contains sub books.
Version 3.3: Document no longer need to be on a server, front image-map broken down into discrete images.
Version 3.2: Frame extensions documented. section on tables completely re-written. Still nothing much about Java. Java picture removed.
Version 3.1: minor corrections, some hot Java support, more to follow. a perl primer is added.
Version 3: added details on netscape extensions to HTML plus ISO character set. POST method in form processing was completely wrong.. how come no-one ever pointed it out.
Version 2: split into several document for a more manageable set of documents. Now only server based, but with a nice front-end.
Version 1: The original one-document Complete-ish guide.

Soap-box

HTML is a growing standard. It does the job it was designed to do but until recently was not the stuff for on-line publishing.

Abode has brought forth the Portable document Format™ ( has PDF Files), A slimmed-down, beefed-up object orientated version of their legendary Postscript™ language.

Significant advances in the HTML direction are:

Hot Java. a Future-proof extension to the standard which will allow your documents to view anything the future may bring so long as you have an applett..
Netscape plug-ins: Vapour at the moment but this promises the ability to view non-html documents using the netscape browser.
Frames allow you to logically arrange how your documents look.

While HTML can not compete with PDF for flexibility (or interleaf or modern word processing document formats) yet, it has it's advantages .. it's human readable, relatively efficient and a user base some megabuck corporations would sell their grannies for.

Copyleft statement

Distributed under the GNU copyleft (any version of your choice). No part of these documents may be printed in any for-profit publication without the authors' explicit written consent.