What does 'HTML is escaping' mean?

Question

Why is HTML is escaping = HTML is showing as it is?

Example: If I try to put any HTML tag here, it will not show that tag (it will simply work). What is it? Escaping or not escaping?

Answer 1

Escaping in HTML means, that you are replacing some special characters with others. In HTML it means usually you replace e.g. < or > or " or &. These characters have special meanings in HTML.

Imagine, you write

<b>Hello, World!</b>

And the text will appear as Hello, World!. But sometime you don't want to have this behaviour. So you replace the < and >.

<b>Hello, World!</b>

This will result in <b>Hello, World!</b>.