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What are tags?

Tags are the "markup" in "Hyper Text Markup Language". They tell the web browser how to display the content of your pages - whether to include an image for example, or feature some text in bold. You mark-up your pages by wrapping tags around your content. So some HTML like this: 

It was a <b>bold</b> move.

Would display like this in a web browser:

Screenshot

What are tags made of?

All tags start with a "less than" sign (<), and finish with a "greater than" sign (>).

Every tag has two parts - an opening and closing tag. You wrap the opening and closing tags around the content you want to mark up. So in the example above, the opening tag looks like this:

<b>

And the closing tag looks like this:

</b>

As you can see, the only difference is the slash in the closing tag.

The opening tag opens the markup - it says: "Make everything after this point bold". The closing tag closes the mark-up - it says: "Stop making everything bold from now on". That's why it's important to remember to close your tags.