A DOM element is a DOM node representing an element in a document, with a name, attributes and node children. In an HTML document, paragraph and emphasis elements are examples. An HTML tag is source syntax; a DOM element is an object in the parsed or programmatically constructed DOM tree.[ref]
Consider
const p = document.createElement("p"); p.setAttribute("class", "note"); p.textContent = "Ready";. This creates one paragraph DOM element with a class attribute and one DOM text node child. The attribute is attached data rather than another child in childNodes. Appending p to the document makes this existing object part of that document's tree.The element's name, attributes and child content have different roles. Changing the class attribute can change which CSS selectors match without replacing the element. Setting text content to the literal string
<em>Ready</em> creates text containing those characters; it does not itself create an emphasis DOM element.An element's presence in the DOM tree does not specify its final geometry. Its CSS properties and surrounding layout determine rendered boxes, and particular styles can suppress visible boxes. Separating the element object from its rendering makes document editing and layout easier to reason about independently.
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