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.

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 consists 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.

Difference Between HTML tags and elements

An HTML element is defined by a starting tag. If the element contains other content, it ends with a closing tag.

For example, <p> is starting tag of a paragraph and </p> is closing tag of the same paragraph but <p>This is paragraph</p> is a paragraph element.