What is an HTML Element? How do you create one?
HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML documents. An HTML element is composed of an opening tag + content + a closing tag.
Example of an HTML element:
<p>This is a paragraph.</p><p>is the opening tag.- This is a paragraph. is the content.
</p>is the closing tag.
Here is a diagram showing all the parts of a paragraph element.
Nested HTML Elements
HTML elements are capable of being nested. Meaning that one element can be placed inside another element.
The following example contains six HTML elements:
<html>, <head>, <title>, <body>, <p>, and <br>:
<html>
<head>
<title>first page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This is a paragraph <br>new line</p>
</body>
</html>The <p> tags, <br> tag, and the content text are all nested inside the body element in the sample above.
Some HTML elements, such as the <br> element, have no content and do not require an end tag. These are known as empty elements. The
tag defines a line break in the paragraph.
Another example of nested elements:
<p>This is <em>Emphasize</em> text</p>
<p>This is <b>bold</b> text</p>In the above example <em> and <b> elements are nested inside <p> element.
Basic Elements
The following are the basic elements of an HTML page that you will come across:
The <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, and <h6> tags are used to indicate a text header.
The <p> tag is used to indicate a paragraph.
The <hr> tag is used to indicate a horizontal ruler.
The <a> (anchor) tag is used to indicate a link.
The tags <ul> (unordered list), <ol> (ordered list), and <li> (list element) are used to indicate a list.
The <img> tag is used to indicate an image.
The <div> tag defines a division or a section in an HTML document
The <span> tag is used to indicate a text span.
Further reading
Want to learn more about HTML elements? Here is a useful reference guide that MDN Web Docs have created – HTML elements reference.
See also
What is an HTML Document’s Basic Structure?
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