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Chapter 2: HTML is Plain Text

That's right, folks--there's nothing special about an HTML document. It contains nothing but plain text, the characters you can type from your keyboard. There are two big advantages to this:

Cross-platform compatibility. Text is handled essentially the same way on all computers, whether it be a Windows PC, a mainframe, a Linux box, or a Macintosh. This means that an HTML document created on a PC will work fine on all other computers, and vice versa providing it was written using valid HTML. This is essential for something that's supposed to be universal, such as the World Wide Web.
Ease of editing. You can create and edit HTML documents with any text editor, such as Notepad and WordPad on Windows systems.

What about different languages? What constitutes "text" in Russia or Japan will be very different from text in the United States or Canada. This is handled by different character sets for different locations. Fortunately you needn't worry about this yet, if your computer is set up properly for where you live, it will already be using the proper character set. You can also specifiy what character set you want your pages to use, but we'll talk more about that later.

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