What is the basic difference between HTML elements and tags?

[spobitsseo]

What is the basic difference between HTML elements and tags?

[Sankara Vignesh]

An element in HTML represents some kind of structure or semantics and generally consists of a start tag, content, and an end tag.

Tags are used to mark up the start and end of an HTML element.

[erieki]

A tag is a part of an HTML element, or rather, an element is the sum of a start-tag, optional content and optional end-tag.

e.g. The 'header' element is made up of the following:
<header> <-- Start tag of the 'header' element.
Text content, and other elements
</header> <-- Closing tag of the 'header' element.

Some elements like <br> don't need a closing tag (if the document is not intended to be XML-compliant) or text content.

Elements and their corresponding start tags can have attributes.
e.g. <img src="/opengraph.png" alt="">
In the above example, the 'img' element has two attributes in its start-tag: src and alt. The 'img' element doesn't have any contents and a closing-tag is not required in HTML5.

[mikerock]

A tag is a subset of element in HTML. An element is the basic building block of HTML and is typically made up of two tags: an opening tag and a closing tag.

For example, the paragraph element <p></p> is made up of the opening tag <p> and the closing tag </p>. The element is the collection of both the starting tag and the ending tag.