HTML5 Elements

HTML Elements

HTML elements are written with a start tag, with an end tag, with the content in between:

<tagname>content</tagname>

The HTML element is everything from the start tag to the end tag:

<p>My first paragraph.</p>

An HTML element is defined by a starting tag. If the element contains other content, it ends with a closing tag, where the element name is preceded by a forward slash as shown below with few tags:

Start Tag	Content	End Tag
<p>	This is paragraph content.	</p>
<h1>	This is heading content.	</h1>
<div>	This is division content.	</div>
<br />

So here <p>....</p> is an HTML element, <h1>...</h1> is another HTML element. There are some HTML elements which don't need to be closed, such as <img.../>, <hr /> and <br /> elements. These are known as void elements.

HTML documents consist of a tree of these elements and they specify how HTML documents should be built, and what kind of content should be placed in what part of an HTML document.

Nested HTML Elements

HTML elements can be nested (elements can contain elements).

All HTML documents consist of nested HTML elements.

This example contains 4 HTML elements:

Example

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>

<body>
  <h1>My First Heading</h1>
  <p>My first paragraph.</p>
</body>

</html>

Try it yourself »

Web Browser

My First Heading

My first paragraph.

Empty HTML Elements

HTML elements with no content are called empty elements.

<br> is an empty element without a closing tag (the <br> tag defines a line break).

Empty element can be "closed" in the opening tag like this: <br />.

HTML5 does not require empty elements to be closed. But if you need stricter validation, and make your document readable by XML parsers, please close all HTML elements. 

                HTML Tip: Use Lowercase Tags                        

HTML tags are not case sensitive: <P> means the same as <p>.

The HTML5 standard does not require lowercase tags, but W3C recommends lowercase in HTML4, and demandslowercase for stricter document types like XHTML.