Why classes instead of just using the element tags for selectors?

Typically u do just target that element. The point where you run into issues is when you have more than one of that element within your page. Lets say you have 3 paragraphs of text, and you only want to style each paragraph with a different border.

<p>This is paragraph 1</p>
<p>This is paragraph 2</p>
<p>This is paragraph 3</p>

/* this will affect "every" paragraph on the page which is NOT what we want */
p {
  border: 2px dashed #ccc;
}

If we instead use a class, we can target exactly which paragraphs we want to affect.

<p>This is paragraph 1</p>
<p>This is paragraph 2</p>
<p class="solid">This is paragraph 3</p>

/* all paragraphs without .solid will have a dashed border */
p {
  border: 2px dashed #ccc;
}
.solid {
  border: 2px solid #ccc;
}

Hopefully that helps.

</TREagans>

When you have multiple tags of the same element, say for instance multiple paragraph elements, using classes helps to keep your code neat, clean, and non-repetitive. In addition, when you want to make changes to those elements, you can target all of the tags at the same time, rather than having to make the change to each one separately.

I did not even think about that. That makes perfect sense. Thank you for your responses!