there are, for example, more than five ways to store text as a file. two of the most known ways are: the plain ".txt" format and the simplest of the "html" formats. the difference is that a .txt file can only store a sequence of characters but an html file can also store links to other files and the formatting of the text, for example whether the text is bold, underlined or italic (but usually html should say whether the text is very important, a link, or not very important; whether important text should be bold, italic or red is then specified using a file in a special format called css).