HTML: HTML stands for "HyperText Markup Language." Essentially, this refers to a standard online language used to implement and create web pages. HTML provides web browsers, from Internet Explorer to Google Chrome, with instructions to display a website to the user. These instructions are expressed in tags enclosed in angle brackets, which are paired up to show where the command begins and ends; the ending bracket will have a "/" in front of the phrase. For example, by typing the phrases "strong" and "/strong" in angle brackets before and after the word "coffee", the web browser is instructed to write the text in bold font, like so: coffee. There are many of these HTML tags, which can have any number of effects on the way the website is displayed. HTML was originally created by physicist Tim Berners-Lee, a contractor at CERN, the French research company best known for creating the World Wide Web, in 1990.
HTML is often mistakenly described as a programming language. However, while programming languages are used to communicate directions to a machine or computer, HTML codes are used to help a computer semantically describe the structure of a web page or document. This makes it an important skill for web design.