Most pages on the Web are stored as ordinary text files which describe the documents using an annotation system called HyperText Markup Language (HTML). This markup language allows you to specify that certain items should be headings, lists, italics, etc. It also allows you to mark paragraphs and line breaks. These properties are indicated by various "tags" which are written inside angle brackets like <HEAD>. Most properties have a beginning tag and an ending tag. For instance, to indicate that some text should be centered on the page, you precede it with <center> and follow it with </center>. The tags are not case-sensitive - that is, I could have written <CENTER> and </CENTER> (or even one upper case and one lower) instead. The ending tags always look like the beginning tag with a slash character after the open angle bracket.
The most important thing to know about HTML tags is that it's OK to not know them all. If you encounter an unfamiliar tag, just ignore it. In fact, this is the official policy used by browsers when displaying HTML documents. This means that you can modify and update web pages without having to know every detail of HTML. That's good, because you surely have better things to do with your life than become an HTML guru.
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