Definition of "text content"

Text content is the text between the > at the end of one tag and the < at the beginning of another tag, not including the tags themselves. By definition, text content does not contain any HTML tags, although it might contain HTML comments. The tags before and after the text content do not necessarily need to be matching starting and ending tags; one or both could be a standalone tag or they could be the ending tag of one element and the starting tag of another. Text content marked up with inline tags is categorized as phrasing content.

For example, in the following HTML code:

<p>Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.<br/>
   Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.</p>

"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall." and "Humpty Dumpty had a great fall." with its leading whitespace are both some text content. These two groups of text content along with the <br/> tag is phrasing content and the entire paragraph, including the starting and ending paragraph tags, is flow content.