A basic element of HTML language is called what?

An HTML tag is commonly defined as a set of characters constituting a formatted command for a Web page. At the core of HTML, tags provide the directions or recipes for the visual content that one sees on the Web.

HTML tags have always been important in the history of Web design. During the early days of the World Wide Web, they were responsible for a majority of Web code. That may not be the case anymore, but HTML tags are still at the center of how Web pages are formatted. Other kinds of languages have been built around the backbone of HTML, such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which makes it easier to create consistent and overarching styles and color schemes.

HTML tags include tags for references, tags for tables, tags for headlines or titles, etc. An HTML tag consists of the tag name in angular brackets and may come in pair, which makes up the beginning and ending tag that frame a particular piece of code, text or other tags. The beginning tag consists of the name, optionally followed by one or more attributes, whereas the ending tag consists of the same name preceded by a forward slash ("/"). For example, the HTML tag "

" begins a paragraph, whereas "