Things are often messy IRL - especially when they happen organically such as the meaning of words (try defining what is a sea and a lake with no exceptions). I

Things are often messy IRL - especially when they happen organically such as the meaning of words (try defining what is a sea and a lake with no exceptions). I remember ‘tag’ was used colloquially in the ‘90s - this was before Javascript was popular. When DOM became a thing in 1998, the definition was more formalized to be consistent across JS and HTML. As things stand, tags usually come in pairs, except for a few (such as <br/>?). An element is now defined as both tags + the content. I believe this evolution happened organically, and many people still prefer the use of ‘tag’ to mean an ‘element’ for conciseness. Update: edited for clarity