The Document

Abstract

The Web is made of documents. Well, mostly. There’s an awful lot of non-text content on the Web: millions of hours of video and audio, billions of photos and drawings, thousands of embeddable games and widgets that require plug-ins, and a vast array of APIs and services working behind the scenes to move information around the Web when it isn’t in document form. But most of the time what you see and interact with—what you probably call a web page—is a rendered HTML document. It might exist as a single self-contained file on a web server, or it might be assembled on the server from separate pieces of code before it’s sent to your web browser, and some or all of it might be generated by dynamic scripts right before your eyes… but it’s still a document. When we refer to an HTML document we mean the entire collection of text and markup that a browser renders into a web page.