By Maurizio Mauri. Italian manual on HTML. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML is a language for describing web pages. HTML is not a programming language, it is a markup language. A markup language is a set of markup tags. HTML uses markup tags to describe web pages. The purpose of a web browser ( like Internet Explorer or Firefox ) is to read HTML documents and display them as web pages. The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page.