Re: why does this work?

[Democritus]

It’s just closing the php interpreter to spill out some html, and then reopening it.

If you don’t know how code works, just play with it. For example, get rid of all the php start and stops. Then, put all the html tags in something like this:

echo "<html_tags>Go in double quotes</html_tags";

The only way to learn to code is to experiment.