` are all considered semantic because they accurately describe the purpose of the element and the type of content that is inside them.
### A Quick History
HTML was originally created as a markup language to describe documents on the early internet. As the internet grew and was adopted by more people, its needs changed. Where the internet was originally inteded for sharing scientific documents, now people wanted to share other things as well. Very quickly, people started wanting to make the web look nicer. Because the web was not initially built to be designed, programmers used different hacks to get things laid out in different ways. Rather than using the `````` to describe information using a table, programmers would use them to position other elements on a page. As the use of visually designed layouts progressed, programmers started to use a generic "non-semantic" tag like ``. They would often give these elements a `class` or `id` attribute to describe their purpose. For example, instead of `` this was often written as `