The tag used to be
but in HTML 4 it was already deprecated. Browser's don't seem to have dropped its support but I would not recommend it for anything beyond quick debugging. The MDN article about
lists two other tags,
and
, that were deprecated even earlier. I'm not aware of any current alternative.
Whatever, the code to encode plain text into HTML is pretty straightforward in most programming languages.
Note: the term similar means exactly that—all three are designed to inject plain text into HTML. I'm not implying that they are synonyms or that they behave identically—they don't.