The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a simple markup language used to create hypertext documents that are portable from one platform to another. HTML documents are SGML documents with generic semantics that are appropriate for representing information from a wide range of applications. HTML can be created and processed by a wide range of tools, from simple plain text editors - you type it in from scratch- to sophisticated WYSIWYG authoring tools. Additionaly, people still prefer to type the HTML code manually by the use of Window's Notepad or Macintosh's SimpleText. Throughout this paper I will be talking about the standards of HTML,how its supplement, XML, has evolved, and why XML is becoming more popular.
First and foremost, when creating a website with the use of HTML, people should know the simple standards and guidelines. The fundamental reason for HTML standards compliance is to ensure that you use only those elements and structures that are likely to be understood by the widest range of user agents (Richmond, 2003). For instance, if I were to speak English while in Japan, most likely they will not be able to understand what I am saying. Likewise, if you use proprietary dialects with HTML, users will not understand anything that you type. .
Moreover, we need standards to make sure that all Web content is viewable by many different kinds of Web browsers--and not just the Web browsers of today, but the handheld devices, cell phones, or other Net devices that may be invented in the future (December, 2003). This is very important today because we live in such a fast paced world. People want to make things as convenient as possible and with these standards they should be able to do that.
There are also some technical reasons why you should try to be fully HTML compliant since some browsers are more efficient when the proper code is used. As an example, newer releases of Netscape and Microsoft Explorer browsers will insert placeholders for images if you have specified the HEIGHT and WIDTH tags as the HTML standard acknowledges.
