Noobie question: what does it mean to "format an article" in HTML?

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I've been running into a lot of writing job descriptions requiring an ability to "format" articles "in HTML." I know a little about the concept of coding, and I understand the idea of HTML as a coding language, but I'm not sure what they mean by using it to "format" a piece of writing.

Whenever I search for this information online, I get a whole bunch of very confusing articles about how to write HTML code and what HTML5 is and then how to use CSS (and so on and so on), but nothing that clearly and simply explains (1) what formatting text in it means or (2) why/for what purpose an article should be formatted in HTML.

If someone could just help me understand WHAT an article formatted in HTML is/looks like/does differently than an article that is just written, saved, and uploaded as a non-coded document, and WHY someone would want one formatted in HTML, I would greatly appreciate it!

What I have tried:

I've tried searching for this information online, but what I've been finding is more complicated than helpful. I don't want a 6-hour course on it! I just want to know what it means to format in HTML and why it's done this way as opposed to a simple document upload.

Posted 28-Mar-16 8:58am

Member 12421574

Updated 28-Mar-16 9:03am

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 28-Mar-16 21:55pm

It's not clear what you possibly may not understand here. Do you know HTML or not? If you know it, you should understand why an article in HTML is good, if not, learn it.
Do you really don't understand that article needs paragraphs, headers, code, all that stuff? Do you really think that an article in pure text could be considered readable?

Also note that this is not a question for this forum; this is a question on a regular user level, non-engineer, and even purely qualified as a user. You probably have to find some forum for non-engineering users, presumably beginners.

By the way, 6-hour course for HTML would be a fair price for this skill, and probably even insufficient. If you are not ready to pay this price, just say bye-bye to HTML in particular, and perhaps to computing in general.

—SA

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F-ES Sitecore · Answer 1 · 2016-03-28T09:03:00

They basically mean can you take text and make it look right\nice on a web page. If you look at a news article like

Oculus founder delivers first Rift headset in person - BBC News[^]

Underlying the page is html that puts things in paragraphs, has titles, links, bold text etc. They're basically asking that you don't just need to be able to write an article, but that they need you to be able to format it using html so they it can go straight to a webpage.