If you’ve browsed a news or shopping website from the early to late noughties, you can be pretty sure that site was built using the .HTML format. This coding language has been around for decades and now competes with more advanced language and web development platforms.
However, it remains relevant today, especially in training and education. Learn more about .HTML files and how to open and read them with our guide.
HTML is the coding language that structures many webpages. The .HTML file format is where you write and lay out that code. You can create a .HTML file in a simple text editor like Notepad or TextEdit or using specialist web development software such as Adobe Dreamweaver.
Files are identified with the .html or .htm extension and comprise of lines of text sectioned off with ‘tags’, to indicate where each element should sit on the page. Common tags include:
HTML was largely based on SGML (Standard Generalised Mark-up Language), the industry standard for structuring written content into distinct elements such as headings and paragraphs. Early versions of HTML were only able to handle text, but later iterations worked with imagery, video and graphic elements.
HTML stands for Hypertext Mark-up Language. The much simpler acronym HTML soon caught on as shorthand for the format among scientists and researchers in the early 1990s. By the noughties, it was commonly recognised as a way to build websites, even among non-tech people.
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The HTML story begins in the early 1990s, when the Internet was mostly been utilised by a select group of scientists and academics located as far apart as Bristol and Geneva.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, computer scientist and inventor of the World Wide Web, developed HTML in 1992 to help make sense of the earliest online content.
After developing HTML, Berners-Lee encouraged fellow scientists to create their own HTML documents, along with software capable of reading them. Working with other pioneers, Berners-Lee tested and refined HTML using primitive, early web browsers. Soon after, a new company called Netscape launched its own successful web browser - and the world shifted on its axis.
As the Internet emerged from research labs and into the public arena, Microsoft launched its own browser —Internet Explorer (IE). In the coming years, I.E. would become one of the most popular ways to access the Internet. The bigger the Internet became, the more people used HTML files to create websites. Soon, the W3 Consortium decided to standardise the format for consistency’s sake.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Web developers and coders use HTML files to structure the content on a webpage. It’s what’s known as a ‘front end’ technology in web development, as it deals with elements that users see, read and use when interacting with a website.
When you look at a webpage, you’ll see it has a distinct layout, much like a magazine or newspaper. HTML files are what makes possible this. Essentially, HTML communicates with the web browser to tell it where to display the various elements on the page based on how everything is tagged.
To set the layout, web developers create HTML elements. This means using common symbols to mark-up content, with the actual text to go on the page placed between alphanumeric tags. For example, a heading for a page about HTML may look like this:
Like any technology, there are pros and cons of working with HTML files.
Pros.
Cons.
To open a .HTML file, you can either launch it within the text editor you created it in, if you want to edit the code or you can view it in a web browser.
When using a Mac, you can open the HTML file in the TextEdit app.
This will show you the HTML as it will display online. If you want to edit the code, you’ll need to choose the option to ‘Display HTML files as HTML code instead of formatted text’.
To view a .HTML file through your web browser, simply find the file on your computer - then right-click (or double click with Mac) and choose Open With before selecting Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge or Firefox.
You can create a .HTML file using either an in-browser text editor or a simple desktop text editor. These include Microsoft Notepad on a PC or TextEdit on a Mac.
To create an HTML file on your PC, simply:
To create an HTML file on Mac, simply:
Once saved, these .HTML files can then be edited too.
.HTM
.HTML and .HTM are interchangeable. Both are file extensions for HTML; the only difference is that Windows required a three-character extension, hence the missing L.
XHTML
XHTML is a version of HTML that demands more accurate mark up with its coding, plus sharper error handling, to ensure it can work with XML data files.
You can convert HTML pages to PDF relatively easily with the correct software. For example, with Adobe Acrobat PDF tools you can save an HTML file as a PDF from within your web browser. This can make it easier for you to share your HTML files with colleagues with the original formatting and functionality retained. You’ll generally need Adobe Acrobat Pro for this. From there, you can easily upload your new PDF to Adobe Acrobat online to combine files, organise pages, split your PDF and more.
DAT files tell you more about the programme that was used to create them.
.JS
JS is short for JavaScript - one of the most widely-used languages for coding website back ends.
Microsoft developed the XPS file to capture page layout information for printing.
TXT is the extension you’d use when creating a plain text file in Notepad.
Adobe Acrobat Online has all the tools you need to do more with your documents.
When creating yourself on a well-maintained and protected device, you should be fine. However, recent research has raised questions around the security of the HTML file, especially when sent as an attachment. IT security company Barracuda Networks foundStudies have shown that a fifth of all HTML email attachments it scanned were malicious. As such, it is important to keep your anti-virus software up to date and be careful which attachments you are opening.
An HTML file is a text-based file that is used to structure the content of a webpage. So, you may write your HTML code in Notepad or TextEdit and then copy it into a professional HTML editor such as Adobe Dreamweaver. You can also write code directly into Dreamweaver or another website building tool.
You can convert HTML pages to PDF relatively easily with the correct software. For example, with Adobe Acrobat PDF tools you can save an HTML file as a PDF from within your web browser. This can make it easier for you to share your HTML files with colleagues with the original formatting and functionality retained. You’ll generally need Adobe Acrobat Pro for this.
Computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML at the CERN scientific research centre in Geneva, Switzerland. Berners-Lee also wrote the first version of HTML in 1993. It came after his invention of the World Wide Web in 1989.
HTML and CSS technologies are used to build the front-end of websites. Often, they are wielded together, with HTML used at the start for the structure and content of the page and CSS then helping to create the visual layout - effects, colour etc. As such, working with both can be an ideal solution.
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