As it concerns my role, accessibility is the main benefit. They do not have identical behaviour.
A <p> tag will be read out by a screen reader as "paragraph", but a div tag will not read out anything but the text inside. I only use a <p> tag if I want my accessible users to know that this is a paragraph (of a larger body of text).
I suppose you could make similar arguments for the other semantic tags. You use them when the content explicitly matches the intent of the tag so that other software can pick up and read it with a bit of... ahem understanding.
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As it concerns my role, accessibility is the main benefit. They do not have identical behaviour.
A <p> tag will be read out by a screen reader as "paragraph", but a div tag will not read out anything but the text inside. I only use a <p> tag if I want my accessible users to know that this is a paragraph (of a larger body of text).
I suppose you could make similar arguments for the other semantic tags. You use them when the content explicitly matches the intent of the tag so that other software can pick up and read it with a bit of... ahem understanding.