What is HTML?
HyperText Markup Language, the markup standard that defines the structure and semantics of every web page.
Also known as: HyperText Markup Language
HTML uses a tree of tags (<html>, <head>, <body>, <h1>, <p>, <a>) to describe what content means: this is a heading, this is a link, this is a navigation block, this is the main article. Browsers turn that tree (the DOM) into a rendered page using CSS for visual styling and JavaScript for behavior.
The current standard is HTML Living Standard (maintained by WHATWG; the W3C HTML5 line was retired in favor of it). Modern HTML adds semantic elements (<article>, <section>, <nav>, <aside>), form types (email, tel, date), embedded media (<video>, <audio>), and a steady stream of accessibility attributes (aria-*, role).
For crawlers and brand-data tools, HTML is the primary input format. Logos hide in <link rel="icon"> and <meta property="og:image">. Colors leak through inline <style> tags and class names that map to CSS variables. Company descriptions, addresses, and contact details live in JSON-LD blocks or microdata. Almost every brand signal you can extract starts with parsing HTML.
In the wild
- A scraper reading
<meta property="og:image">to grab the share preview image - A semantic HTML page using
<article>and<time datetime="...">so screen readers and search engines parse it correctly - An LLM ingesting cleaned HTML (with
<script>and<style>removed) as context for question answering