The PLAINTEXT Tag

The one-way door. Everything after it is literal text and there is no way back.

In 2026: Browsers still honour it, which is why the demo below stops rendering HTML halfway through. There is no closing tag: it was defined that way in 1991 and never fixed. It was already deprecated in HTML 2.0.

Where it came from: HTML Tags, Tim Berners-Lee, 1991. Deprecated by HTML 2.0 in 1995. MDN ↗

<p>This paragraph renders normally.</p>

<plaintext>
<b>From here down nothing is HTML any more.</b>
<script>alert('this never runs')</script>
There is no closing tag. There never was.