An HTML element is defined by a start tag, some content, and an end tag:
The HTML element is everything from the start tag to the end tag:
| Start tag | Element content | End tag |
|---|---|---|
| <h1> | My First Heading | </h1> |
| <p> | My first paragraph. | </p> |
| <br> | none | none |
HTML elements can be nested (this means that elements can contain other elements).
All HTML documents consist of nested HTML elements.
The following example contains four HTML elements (<html>, <body>, <h1> and <p>):
In the example, the <body> element is nested inside the <html> element. The <h1> element and the <p> element are nested inside of the <body> element
Some HTML elements will be displayed correctly, even without the end tag. For example, the following would still display correctly:
However, you should never rely on this to work. Unexpected results may occur if you forget the end tag!
HTML elements with no content are called empty elements.
The <br> tag defines a line break, and is an empty element without a closing tag:
HTML tags are not case sensitive: <P> means the exact same thing as <p>.
The HTML standard does not nesicarily require lowercase tags, but W3C reccomends lowercase in HTML.