Things have gotten somewhat more complicated recently, and now HTML has expanded its scope to the point where it is almost too complicated to use without a tool to help you. In addition, there are now hundreds of tools available that will help you, so it is rarely necessary to edit tags by hand. However, for much of the scripting we will do in this series you need to know HTML, so this article offers a very brief introduction to the basics. For more information you can look in the tool links page listed at the bottom of this article for a wide range of other far more advanced HTML tutorials. If you already know HTML you may want to jump to the next article in the series.
Most browsers still accept raw text.
That is, if you take a raw text file that contains no tags at all, stick the file in a web server's directory tree, and enter its URL in a browser, the browsers will display it. However, the use of raw text is not recommended. This page contains indentation that would be uncommon in a normal page, but it helps to highlight the structure. The header and body are similarly bracketed. The text of the page itself goes in the body.