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How it works
Hypertext Markup Language does exactly what it says. It marks up text. For instance, see the line below:
The quick brown dog jumped over the lazy fox.
Obviously, the line is in a bold typeface. You are no doubt, familiar with a word processor. To achieve this effect in Microsoft Word, you would simply click the Bold icon and type.
HTML applies markup tags to plain text that the browser will read and display the text appropriately. Below is an example of the previous example formatted with html tags.
The quick brown dog jumped over the lazy fox.b>
The above sentence contains markup tags that change the appearance of the text in between them when viewed by a browser. Notice the tag. This is the html bold tag. Any text enclosed in angle brackets <> is considered a markup tag by a browser. Now, if you will notice the tag. If the tag as an angle bracket followed by a backslash then it is a closing tag. A closing tag tells the browser to end the type of formatting specified.
For instance, if I wrote:
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
It would appear:
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog
If you notice the rest of the text is displayed normally. If there are not modifying markup tags then the browser will simply render the text in it’s default state. Unless specified differently the default for text is black, 12pt, Times New Roman. Also, important to note, if a browser can not understand a tag, or the tag is incorrect, then the browser simply disregards it and renders the text in its default state.
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