Markup

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The paragraph you are reading is unformatted monospaced text. For years, this format (called "plain text" or ASCII) has been the stuff of which communication on the Internet was Made. This is because plain text is the lowest common denominator -- plain text documents can be opened and read by virtually any computer on any network. This text-only world is fast and cheap. It's also nauseatingly dull! The World Wide Web and browsers written to navigate it have changed all that, converting information into a media-rich environment -- one in which anyone can publish his/er documents containing not only text of various sizes, colors and styles, but also pictures, sound, movies and more.

Although web pages seldom appear on-screen as plain ASCII text anymore, it remains the basic material from which the web pages are constructed. Transforming plain text into fomatted text is done by "marking it up" with small instructions called "tags", that tell the browser application how to display it on-screen.

Example:

This sentence has markup instructions 
applied to <strong>two</strong> 
of the <em>words</em>.

This illustrates two basic ideas used in marking up text:

1. Markup instructions are always enclosed between less-than "<" and greater-than ">" signs to distinguish them from viewable text.
   In the example above, <em> caused the associated text to be rendered in emphasized or italics, and the <strong> caused the text to appear "bold" or heavier in weight.
2. A markup instruction is terminated by the forward slash "/" symbol usually in matched pairs of tags.
   In the above example, <em> turned on italics, and </em> turned it off. (Had the closing </em> instruction been forgotten, all of the remaining text on this page would have been italicized.)

In the jargon of web designers "HTML doc" or "source" refers to the markup code (text) intended for viewing in a web browser. When viewed in the browser, HTML docs are called web pages.

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