This document has been reviewed by W3C members and other interested parties and has been endorsed by the Director as a W3C Recommendation. It is a stable document and may be used as reference material or cited as a normative reference from another document.
W3C's role in making the Recommendation is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment. This enhances the functionality and interoperability of the Web.
A list of current W3C Recommendations and other technical documents can be found at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/.
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.
This specification defines HTML version 3.2. HTML 3.2 aims to capture recommended practice as of early '96 and as such to be used as a replacement for HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866).
HTML 3.2 is W3C's specification for HTML, developed in early `96 together with vendors including IBM, Microsoft, Netscape Communications Corporation, Novell, SoftQuad, Spyglass, and Sun Microsystems.
HTML 3.2 adds widely deployed features such as tables, applets and text flow around images, while providing full backwards compatibility with the existing standard HTML 2.0.
W3C is continuing to work with vendors on extensions for accessibility features, multimedia objects, scripting, style sheets, layout, forms, math and internationalization. W3C plans on incorporating this work in further versions of HTML.