HoTMetaL was a very early commercial HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

-authoring software, released in 1994 by SoftQuad Software

SoftQuad Software

SoftQuad Software is best known for its HoTMetaL HTML editing software. HoTMetaL was one of a series of applications created by SoftQuad for editing, viewing and publishing structured content...

 of Toronto, Canada.

Based on the SGML engine of SoftQuad Author/Editor, HoTMetaL was released with a free version (HoTMetal Free) and a professional version (HoTMetaL Pro). There was also a "light" version. It received PC Magazine

PC Magazine

PC Magazine is a computer magazine published by Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009...

's Editors' Choice Award in 1995 as well as a variety of other awards. However the port to the Mac platform was regarded as poorly executed.

HoTMetaL went through several incarnations from versions 1 though 6. The Macintosh version survived until at least version 3. Eventually the product line was discontinued as an HTML editor

HTML editor

An HTML editor is a software application for creating web pages. Although the HTML markup of a web page can be written with any text editor, specialized HTML editors can offer convenience and added functionality. For example, many HTML editors work not only with HTML, but also with related...

, although the user interface lives on in XMetaL

XMetaL

XMetaL, or XMetaL Author, is a software application used for creating and editing documents in XML and SGML. It has some features common to word processors, but is a native XML editor that can be configured to work with various standard and custom DTDs and XML Schema...

, a commercial XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 editor.

The editor had several views (including text and WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...

), most-notably though was the "Tags-On" view. This provided a WYSIWYG-like view of the page being edited with overlay icons showing where the code tags started and ended. This view is still used in the XML editing module of Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign is a software application produced by Adobe Systems. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers and books. In conjunction with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite InDesign can publish content suitable for tablet devices...

.

On 15 March 2002 the Corel Corporation acquired SoftQuad, although the Corel web site has no reference to HoTMetaL or any other web development tools.

The name

The capital letters in HoTMetaL spell HTML. The term "hot metal

Hot metal typesetting

In printing and typography, hot metal typesetting refers to 19th-century technologies for typesetting text in letterpress printing. This method injects molten type metal into a mold that has the shape of one or more glyphs...

" is one of several terms used for historical typesetting technology, which involves melting alloys into the shape of letters so they can be used by Linotype

Linotype machine

The Linotype typesetting machine is a "line casting" machine used in printing. The name of the machine comes from the fact that it produces an entire line of metal type at once, hence a line-o'-type, a significant improvement over manual typesetting....

and other machines to print words on paper.