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HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. This language is used by your browser to figure out how to display the page content.

"Markup" means the addition of instructions [tags] to the browser identified by a pair of angle brackets <tag>. These instructions most often come in pairs surrounding some text, as follows:

<tag> some text </tag> where the / character in the second tag indicates the end of that instruction.

One of the exceptions to this "rule" that instructions (tags) come in pairs is for comments which are inserted as a note by a writer but are not shown by the browser. Such comments begin with the characters <!-- and end with -->, as indicated below.

This is some text that you can change. <!-- Note how the extra spacing between words, as well as empty lines, are ignored when processed by the browser, as seen in the other window, and how this comment is not displayed. --> We can add some <i>markup</i> and see the result.

Try to change the tags (both of them) from i to b or tt and see how the appearance of the text is modified. You can also try to add other pairs of tags elsewhere and see what happens; don't worry, no matter what you do, you are not going to break anything!

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