Digression: HTML

• The structure (or, to a somewhat lesser extent, the displayed appearance) of a HTML document (or Web page) is described using embedded formatting codes (or tags) intermingled with the information in the document.
   
  
• In HTML, the markup tags are delimited by the special characters "<" and ">" -- the "less than" and "greater than" characters, often (rather clumsily IMHO) called "angle brackets". If either of these characters must appear as part of the actual data, they are written as < and > respectively.
   
  
• HTML introduced a uniform, and revolutionary, way of specifying hyperlinks in a document, using the <A HREF="...some URL...:">link text</A> structure. This was revolutionary!
   
  
• Modern HTML standards have evolved to support incredibly complex document layouts (using the <TABLE> markup, style sheets, client-side scrpting, etc), seemlessly mingling text and graphics into what has become an entirely new form of media.