html element

An HTML element is an individual component of an HTML document. HTML documents are composed of a tree of HTML elements and other nodes, such as text nodes. Each element can have attributes specified. Elements can also have content, including other elements and text. HTML elements represent semantics, or meaning. For example, the title element represents the title of the document.

The tag tells the browser that this is an HTML document.
The element is also known as the root element.
The tag is the container for all other HTML elements (except for the tag).

The tag supports the following standard attributes dir, lang and xml:lang