HTML <plaintext> Tag

What You’ll Learn

The <plaintext> tag is an obsolete HTML element from the early web. This guide explains its historical behavior, deprecated status, and the modern tags beginners should use instead.

What Is the <plaintext> Tag?

The <plaintext> tag is an HTML element that was originally used to display all subsequent content on a page as plain text, ignoring other HTML tags. Once a browser encountered <plaintext>, everything that followed was rendered as literal text.

Learn plaintext only to understand legacy HTML. For code snippets, documentation, and unformatted text today, use pre, code, or textarea.

🚫 Deprecated Status

The <plaintext> tag is deprecated and should not be used in modern HTML documents. It is no longer supported in modern browsers and does not conform to current HTML standards. Instead, developers are encouraged to use supported methods for displaying text and code.

• Listed as obsolete in the HTML5 specification.
• No modern browser implements plaintext rendering behavior.
• Using it can break page structure unpredictably in legacy environments.
• Replace with pre, code, or textarea in all new projects.

📝 Syntax

The syntax for <plaintext> is straightforward, though its use is strongly discouraged:

<plaintext>
Your text here
</plaintext>

Syntax Rules

• Historically, many documents used an opening tag only; all content after it became plain text.
• Modern parsers do not treat plaintext as a functional element.
• Never use plaintext to display code or disable HTML parsing today.
• Use pre with escaped entities for showing raw HTML source safely.

⚖️ <plaintext> vs <pre>

📚 Common Use Cases

Due to its deprecated status, the <plaintext> tag should not be used in modern web development. Historically, it displayed raw text content without HTML processing. Today, there are better alternatives for showing code or preformatted text.

Examples Gallery

Practice the modern replacements for obsolete plaintext: pre, code, and textarea.

Your preformatted text here
  Spaces and line breaks preserved.

<pre>
Your preformatted text here
</pre>

Your preformatted text here

In this example, we use the <code>console.log()</code> function to display a message in the browser console.

<textarea>
Your text here
</textarea>

♿ Accessibility

• Never use plaintext — It breaks document structure and confuses assistive technology.
• Label textarea fields — Associate label elements with form textareas.
• Escape HTML in code examples — Use pre with entity escaping so screen readers get correct content.
• Prefer semantic tags — code signals programmatic text to assistive technology.

💡 Best Practices