Forgive me my ignorance but I am very new to the HTML 5 arena and never worked with graphics using Javascript.

I was doing some reading and came across the Canvas tag and the source stated that the canvas tag acts as a graphics container and is used to render graphics on the webpage by the use of Javascript. 

My questions is, why would I need to use **Canvas** as a placeholder to render graphics instead of using some other arbitrary tag that can be used as a graphics placeholder for example?