thoughts

tags, elements, attributes, properties etc

2006-02-20

For once and for all:

Element

An element is an HTML (or XML) building block, they are the whole thing and exist in DOM space. They consist of attributes and child elements and are described by a start tag, content and an end tag. Example <p class="lede">this is a p element</p>.

Attribute

An attribute is an extention to an element, it's the class="lede" part in the above example and are built up by a (attribute) name and (attribute) value.

Tag

An element is bounded by its opening and closing tags, so it's the <p class="lede"> and the </p> parts. So please stop talking about tags when you mean elements or attributes! A nice example is that you can omit both start and end tags for the html, head and body elements (in html), but the elements themselves are always present (in DOM space).

Properties

Properties only live in DOM space. Some attributes reappear as properties, but they are not a priori the same, think of the className property versus the class attribute. They do not appear in the source code.