HTML, or HyperText Markup Language is a series of "tags" that allow a world wide web "browser" like Netscape to create a formatted web page. They are written in ascii text. Tags are enclosed like this: < > and are usually ended with < / > [exceptions that do not need an ending tag are: < p > for paragraph (with vertical space, < br > for line break without space, < li > for denoting an item in a list, < hr > for a formatting line].

For a basic html document the tags are few and rather simple. Here are some of the most important: