HTML, or HyperText Markup Language is designed to specify the logical organization of a document, with important hypertext extensions. It is not designed to be the language of a WYSIWYG word processor such as Word or WordPerfect. This choice was made because the same HTML document may be viewed by many different "browsers", of very different abilities. Thus, for example, HTML allows you to mark selections of text as titles or paragraphs, and then leaves the interpretation of these marked elements up to the browser. For example one browser may indent the beginning of a paragraph, while another may only leave a blank line. HTML is coded in a word processor in simple words used in angular brackets called tags to save it in a file extension called “.html”. The text includes markup tags such as to indicate the start of a paragraph, and to indicate the end of a paragraph. HTML documents are often referred to as "Web pages". The browser retrieves Web pages from Web servers that thanks to the Internet can be pretty much anywhere in World.

The detailed rules for HTML (the names of the tags/elements, how they can be used) are defined using another language known as the standard generalized markup language, or SGML. SGML is extremely difficult, and was designed for massive document collections, such as repair manuals for F-16 fighters, or maintenance plans for nuclear submarines.

You can use many word editor tools like notepad, MS Word, or textedit on Mac to code the language in the tags provided. In the yesteryears, we dint have html editors, but now we have many like coffeecup html editor, dreamweaver etc, which present the graphical interface or result of the tags written. Also, HTML was made easier because of the buttons it presents which automatically generate the source code, thus reducing the need for manual coding.

HTML instructions divide the text of a document into blocks called elements. These can be divided into two broad categories -- those that define how the BODY of the document is to be displayed by the browser, and those that define information `about' the document, such as the title or relationships to other documents. The vocabulary of these elements and a description of the overall design of HTML documents is given in the rest of Section 2. The Last part of the section also describes standard naming schemes for HTML documents and related files.

Many elements can have arguments that pass parameters to the interpreter handling this element. These arguments are called attributes of the element. For example, consider the element A, which marks a region of text as the beginning (or end) of a hypertext link. This element can have several attributes. One of them, HREF, specifies the hypertext document to which the marked piece of text is linked. Similarly, there are others as well, now consider FONT as an example, it has Size, color etc as attributes, thus shaping how the element looks.