Rendering the HTML Open Tag

When you are posting material about HTML and need to use the open carrot, or less-than symbol (<), you can't just type < because the Web browser will parse that as the opening for a tag (i.e. <html>) and render the page in some wild and crazy way. It is a reserved character, as they say.

So you write this: "&lt;" or "&#60;" as the opening tag (without the quotes).

For instance:

&lt;html&gt;

will get you this:

<html> 

btw, these strings of symbols correspond to the reserved character naming and numbering rules, i.e. &entity_name; OR &#entity_number; ...

This "&gt;" can render the closing tag, but you may not need that, at least if you haven't opened any more tags...

No I will not explain how to render "&gt;" on a Web page, because that would involve another level of recursion I don't feel up to sussing out this afternoon...

Thanks to the W3C Schools for this tip-a-rooni.

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