I'm making a simple todo list app to brush up on BackboneJS a little. I had been building my individual task view by appending a string containing li tags and specifying the class, like this:
<li class="task">this.model.get('text')</li>
Then, I saw that each of these list items was enclosed in a div, which I didn't want. I realized that if no tag name is specified, Backbone makes a div for the view, and that div is the el that you add things to with that view's render method.
It's cool that Backbone lets you follow the Backbone way as much as you want. Even if you don't take full advantage of all of its features, you can still take advantage of parts of it. Other frameworks require more adherence to their ways of doing things.