Starting a brand and making it more successful in today’s world is more tedious. You can’t just have an offline store; having an online one will help you reach more customers.
For that, you need a good and attractive website that showcases your products. We are often required to submit reports for our projects.
It would be easy if the software provides us the privilege to make the changes.
Key Takeaways
- HTML and Rich Text are two ways of formatting text on the web or in digital documents.
- While HTML allows for more precise and customizable formatting, Rich Text is a simpler way of formatting that can be used across different platforms and applications.
- HTML is often used for creating websites and digital publications, while Rich Text is used for basic text formatting in documents and emails.
HTML vs Rich Text
HTML and Rich Text are formats used for text styling and formatting. HTML is a coding language that allows for complex webpage layouts, and web pages to be structured and designed. Rich Text is used for text processing that preserves text formatting across different devices and platforms.

HTML was first developed to create heading, paragraphs, and text formats. But, later, it moved to create designs for web pages.
It helps you to create customized templates for your web pages. You need to have a piece of good programming knowledge of HTML to create a complete website.
Rich Text helps you to format your data using Ribbon and Mini Toolbar. Rich Text provides many formatting options.
In order to create a Rich Text, you need to use Datasheet View or Design View. Rich Text will allow you to change the text to plain text.
Comparison Table
Parameters of Comparison | HTML | Rich Text |
---|---|---|
Founded | 1993 | 1987 |
Advantages | The output can be viewed by almost all web browsers and easier to understand. | It takes more time to code, and errors will pop up frequently, which will be difficult to solve. |
Disadvantages | It can be read using many platforms. | The file size will become large, and it will be difficult to shrink the file. |
Extension | .htm, .html | RTF. It also depends on the type of Rich Text Format. |
Coding | Easier | Easier |
What is HTML?
The expansion of HTML is Hypertext Markup Language. It is used for designing web pages.
HTML contains elements, and they are represented using tags. These elements are called the building blocks of the website.
It can be further made well by implementing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and a scripting language called JavaScript. It is taught to students in school nowadays.
They will better understand how a website works and what things are needed to make it real.
HTML was developed by Tim Berners Lee. If you are good at HTML, then you can design web pages, and to make it work well, you can either use MYSQL or PHP.
It will make your website real by getting inputs. Even if you work with WordPress for building sites, you will be required to have an understanding of HTML and CSS.
The term hypertext means the webpage will contain many links. When you click on a text, it will take you to some other pages.
This is one of the ways to link the web pages together using hyperlinks.
HTML has many versions, such as HTML 2, HTML 3, HTML 4, and HTML 5. The version HTML 2 was released on November 24, 1995.
The version HTML 3 was released on January 14, 1997. The version HTML 4 was released on December 18, 1997.
The last and current version, HTML 5, was released on October 28, 2014.

What is Rich Text?
Rich Text contains formatting commands. They are used for page layouts.
Some of the layouts are fonts, underlining, bold, and italics. It can also be used to refer to multimedia documents such as images, audio, and video.
It is published by Microsoft Corporation. This was developed by Richard Brodie, David Luebbert, and Charles Simonyi.
They were members of the Microsoft team. This text was first influenced by typesetting.
A standard Rich Text contains only 7 ASCII characters.
This can be easily read by normal humans. They will be in normal English so people with English knowledge can easily understand.
It is trusted by many people.
It can be customized the way you want. It allows the users to change it according to their use and style.
You can limit the formatting options and tags in the way you want. It gives you the complete privilege to change.
It contains some text formatting options such as paragraphs, lists, and blockquotes. It allows you to make entries and content.
These things can be linked dynamically so that they can be embedded in the text flow.

Main Differences Between HTML and Rich Text
- In HTML, you can include animated pictures and gifs. But Rich Text won’t allow you to add these things.
- Rich Text is used for embedding the images into a file, but HTML will allow you to make it a hyperlink.
- Rich Text won’t support you to add more images. It will limit the image numbers. On the other hand, you can use HTML to create a separate image gallery for your website, depending upon your use.
- They both have the ability to resize the text, format, font size and gives you the privilege to change them in the way you want.
- You can make the webpage more colorful by adding relevant tags and more images. In Rich Text, you can only type and can convert it into DOC and DOCX formats.

- https://patents.google.com/patent/US7890852B2/en
- https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vassilios_Mardiris/publication/255639140_Web_Based_html-rich_text_Editor_web-editor_Using_Open_Source_Software/links/0deec52024e8e8b1c3000000.pdf
Sandeep Bhandari holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Computers from Thapar University (2006). He has 20 years of experience in the technology field. He has a keen interest in various technical fields, including database systems, computer networks, and programming. You can read more about him on his bio page.