The Difference Between a Tag and an Element

The Difference Between a Tag and an Element

A Tag

A tag is simply a less than sign (<), followed by a forward slash (/) if it’s a closing/ending tag, followed by a string of one or more pre-defined characters (a, li, body, etc), followed by a greater than sign (>). For example, the starting/opening body tag:

<body>

Or the closing paragraph tag:

</p>

If you make a mistake in the spelling of a tag, that is, if you spell a tag that is not defined by HTML, then browsers will typically ignore it. If your misspelled tags contain content, the tags are ignored, but the content is rendered in a browser. The content “Here’s my misshapen document” in the following example will be rendered in the browser, but the tags will be ignored.

<boddyy>
Here’s my misshapen document
</boddyy>

An Element

An element consists of the opening/starting tag, all its allowable content, and the closing/ending tag. If it’s an empty element, like, for example, the image tag, then the element consists of only the opening/starting tag. Here’s the image element:

<img src="shihtzu.jpg"
     width="300"
     height="300"
     alt="[A 5-year old Shih Tzu]">

And here’s the paragraph element:

<p>This is a paragraph.</p>

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