English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I have this sentence:
By inserting HTML tags into a page of text and other content, you mark which part of the page is what to provide structure to the document.
By inserting HTML tags into a page of text and other content is the adverb of manner ,in the last part of the sentence, you mark which part of the page is what to provide structure to the document.
My questions are:
- Is you mark which part of the page the subject?
- How to understand the what in what to provide structure to the document?
There's nothing wrong grammatically. The which is what (or what's what) construction is an idiomatic form generally used when associating a list of things with a list of names or purposes. Consider a bunch of bicycle parts laying on a table. One might announce, "Here's all the parts you need." To which your friend might ask, "Yes, but which is what?" Meaning, "Please tell me the name or purpose of each of these parts because I don't know what they are or where they go."
Likewise in your sentence, there are a bunch of parts to the HTML document and the HTML tags provides the means of identifying what each part of the page is and thus provide structure to the document- E.g., here's the document header, here's the body, here's some divs, here's a title, etc.
The subject of your sentence is you and the verb is mark.
I agree with Jim. I answer the question to provide a clearer parsing.
(By inserting HTML tags into a page of text and other content), you mark (which part of the page is what) (to provide structure to the document).
It might be easier to understand it like this:
