A "markup language" is one which consists of instructions which are embedded (marked up) in the text to be printed.  These instructions are called "metacommands."  Metacommands are distinguished from the text to be printed, itself, by the convention of enclosing them in < and > signs.

Metacommands instruct the command interpreter how to display the text on the page - essentially, how to typeset the page, with all the complexities that implies.

The idea of delivering hypertext documents over the Internet using a was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee working at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Switzerland, in 1989.  CERN collaborated with NSCA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana, Illinois, to produce the first beta version of HTML.  It was made available for use by the summer of 1991 with the early Mosaic Internet browser developed by NSCA.  HTML was in wide use by 1992, largely in academe and government/military sites.  Version 1.0 was developed and available for use on the WWW in 1993. Since then there have been several revisions, additions and extensions to the basic code.   Version 4.01 is now the current standard for HTML.  Not all browsers can accommodate new HTML 4.01 conventions and various browser-specific extensions of the code have been proposed and are in use.

HTML is far less complex than SGML but retains the basic metacommand set, almost universally referred to as "tags" or "HTML tags," that permits a WWW browser to "typeset" a web page.  The metacommands instruct the browser how to display the page.  Any Internet browser, such as Netscape or Internet Explorer, can interpret the basic set of HTML metacommands, but not necessarily with the same visual result. This is important to remember.  Each browser interprets and displays HTML slightly differently, some better than others.  The resolution of the screen display on a microcomputer radically affects the way in which a browser can display HTML documents. It will always try to interpret the code to fit the display within the available space.  This is not under the control of the HTML author. 

Pages can look great in one browser at one screen resolution and very silly in another at a different screen resolution. Essentially, HTML code merely provides instructions to the browser software on how to construct and display the webpage, the browser provides the interpretation.  To some extent interpretation of the HTML code is also under the control of the individual viewing the web page.  He or she can, and may, disable features which are important to achieving the proper screen realization of an HTML author's code.  As in most other cases, in HTML code interpretation Murphy's Law also prevails.

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