# Html Msg vs Html msg?
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**Category:** Learn\
**Created:** [December 13, 2018, 4:19pm UTC](https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/html-msg-vs-html-msg/2758 "2018-12-13T16:19:32Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 4
**Author:**  [@joelq](https://discourse.elm-lang.org/u/joelq)\
**Post date:** [December 13, 2018, 6:39pm UTC](https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/html-msg-vs-html-msg/2758/4 "2018-12-13T18:39:38Z")
I think part of the confusion here is that there are two different things referred to as “message” in the Elm community.
1. The generic idea of a value that represents an event in the outside world and that will eventually feed into your update function. It shows up as a type variable in several types where it is conventionally written as little “m” `msg` (e.g. `Html msg`, `Cmd msg`)
2. A user-defined custom type named big “M” `Msg`
While there’s often a lot of overlap between the two, they are not the same. `Msg` isn’t a “magic” framework type and types like `Html String` or `Html Int` are valid. More subtly, larger projects such as [elm-spa-example](https://github.com/rtfeldman/elm-spa-example) often have view functions that return values like `Html Home.Msg` or `Html Article.Msg`
While the lowercase `msg` variable name has good intentions of communicating _“the type that would go here fills the role of a message (definition 1)”_, my experience is that many people read it as _“the type that would go here is going to be a `Msg` (definition 2)”_.
Personally, I’ve started using `Html a` in my own code rather than `Html msg` to avoid this confusion 🙂
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_[View the full topic](https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/html-msg-vs-html-msg/2758)._