I notice that most people use the words HTML tags and HTML elements interchangeably.
But what is the difference between them?
The way I see it is that tags are in the source code and elements are processed tags (by the browser) in the DOM. Am I wrong?
This question is related to
html
terminology
The answer is
HTML tags vs. elements vs. attributes
HTML elements
An element in HTML represents some kind of structure or semantics and generally consists of a start tag, content, and an end tag. The following is a paragraph element:
<p> This is the content of the paragraph element. </p>HTML tags
Tags are used to mark up the start and end of an HTML element.
<p></p>
HTML attributes
An attribute defines a property for an element, consists of an attribute/value pair, and appears within the element’s start tag. An element’s start tag may contain any number of space separated attribute/value pairs.
The most popular misuse of the term “tag” is referring to alt attributes as “alt tags”. There is no such thing in HTML. Alt is an attribute, not a tag.
<img src="foobar.gif" alt="A foo can be balanced on a bar by placing its fubar on the bar's foobar.">
Source: 456bereastreet.com: HTML tags vs. elements vs. attributes
Tags and Elements are not the same.
Elements
They are the pieces themselves, i.e. a paragraph is an element, or a header is an element, even the body is an element. Most elements can contain other elements, as the body element would contain header elements, paragraph elements, in fact pretty much all of the visible elements of the DOM.
Eg:
<p>This is the <span>Home</span> page</p>
Tags
Tags are not the elements themselves, rather they're the bits of text you use to tell the computer where an element begins and ends. When you 'mark up' a document, you generally don't want those extra notes that are not really part of the text to be presented to the reader. HTML borrows a technique from another language, SGML, to provide an easy way for a computer to determine which parts are "MarkUp" and which parts are the content. By using '<' and '>' as a kind of parentheses, HTML can indicate the beginning and end of a tag, i.e. the presence of '<' tells the browser 'this next bit is markup, pay attention'.
The browser sees the letters '
' and decides 'A new paragraph is starting, I'd better start a new line and maybe indent it'. Then when it sees '
' it knows that the paragraph it was working on is finished, so it should break the line there before going on to whatever is next.- Opening tag.
- Closing tag
http://html.net/tutorials/html/lesson3.php
Tags are labels you use to mark up the begining and end of an element.
All tags have the same format: they begin with a less-than sign "<" and end with a greater-than sign ">".
Generally speaking, there are two kinds of tags - opening tags:
<html>and closing tags:</html>. The only difference between an opening tag and a closing tag is the forward slash "/". You label content by putting it between an opening tag and a closing tag.HTML is all about elements. To learn HTML is to learn and use different tags.
For example:
<h1></h1>
Where as elements are something that consists of start tag and end tag as shown:
<h1>Heading</h1>
<p>Here is a quote from WWF's website:</p>.
In this part <p> is a tag.
<blockquote cite="www.facebook.com">facebook is the world's largest socialsite..</blockquote>
in this part <blockquote> is an element.
lets put this in a simple term. An element is a set of opening and closing tags in use.
Element
<h1>...</h1>
Tag H1 opening tag
<h1>
H1 closing tag
</h1>
This visualization can help us to find out difference between concept of element and tag (each indent means contain):
- element
- content:
- text
- other elements
- or empty
- and its markup
- tags (start or end tag)
- element name
- angle brackets < >
- or attributes (just for start tag)
- or slash /
HTML Elements
An HTML element usually consists of a start tag and end tag, with the content inserted in between:
<tagname>Content goes here...</tagname>
The HTML element is everything from the start tag to the end tag. Source
HTML Attributes
An attribute is used to define the characteristics of an HTML element and is placed inside the element's opening tag. All attributes are made up of two parts: a name and a value.
- All HTML elements can have attributes
- Attributes provide additional information about an element
- Attributes are always specified in the start tag
- Attributes usually come in name/value pairs like: name="value" Source
HTML Tag vs Element
"Elements" and "tags" are terms that are widely confused. HTML documents contain tags, but do not contain the elements. The elements are only generated after the parsing step, from these tags. Source: wikipedia > HTML_element
An HTML element is defined by a starting tag. If the element contains other content, it ends with a closing tag.
For example <p> is starting tag of a paragraph and </p> is closing tag of the same paragraph but <p>This is paragraph</p> is a paragraph element.
Source:tutorialspoint > html_elements
Source: Stackoverflow.com