The acronym HTML stands for "HyperText Markup Language". The World Wide Web is built of web pages, and those pages are themselves written in HTML. HTML is the fundamental language of the web. Although people refer to “HTML Programming” with a capital P, HTML is really not a programming language at all. HTML is exactly what it claims to be: a markup language. One uses HTML to mark up a text document, analogous to how an editor would by using a red pencil. The marks, applied in the form of HTML tags, indicate which format (or presentation style) should be used when displaying the marked text.

HTML has become the ubiquitous document formatting standard. Most word processors now support an HTML export option. The growing use of the company Intranet for communication demands the conversion to HTML for a wide variety of documents.

MSC Acumen applications use HTML as an effective means for communicating information and instructions to the user. The applications are written to fit particular work flow scenarios. They must control the simulation process while communicating a language and terminology understood by the targeted users. HTML facilitates a flexible text and graphics display that makes the communication task much easier.

Small packets of HTML are displayed on the Tutorial form as individual dialog items. Typically, using only the most basic HTML markup tags are sufficient to produce pleasing and readable dialog. Such basic tags include those for creating paragraph breaks and for creating lists of items. In addition, using font control tags to color particular text for emphasis is quite effective. The example "drive pages" listed in this document include the recommended tags for general text and background color control for all HTML dialog packets. See Example of a Home Drive Page (Step 1), 25 and Example of a Home Drive Page (Steps 2-n), 29. The only special item that the application author includes within the Tutorial HTML dialog packets is the special syntax for invoking fixed-argument PCL function calls from hypertext links. This syntax is shown on AAI.html_calls, 127.

The Tutorial application author may also provide auxiliary help documents for each step of the simulation process. These help documents are written as HTML web pages. They are displayed in a commercial web browser which opens up as a separate application when the "Help" button is selected. The author also has the ability to write web pages for any auxiliary information required, and to display it in the commercial browser automatically at any point during the process. It is not difficult to write out text information from a PCL function to an external HTML format file. This method facilitates the dynamic display of auxiliary information. The preformatted tag <pre> is useful for this.