You don't have to specify those things in a View if you don't want to, by simply telling the View what element to attach to:

    new View({el: domElement})

... but it's part of Backbone's goals -- which are further explained towards the end of the video -- that a given view has an element at all times, even before any templates may or may not have been rendered.

Always having an element means that you can worry less about view state. If all of your DOM events are delegated from the root element, you don't have to worry about whether the template has been rendered yet, which particular template might have been rendered, whether the data is available yet, and so on... The events continue to work regardless.

> when I used it I really didn't like that I had to specify the tag name, the class name, etc in a Backbone.View object.

You don't have to do it if you don't want to. Simplest way to not do it is just implement your custom `render`, and you'll have everything in an empty `div` (the default). If you want your template root to be the element's root (el/$el) as well, you can quite trivially do so by calling View#setElement from View#render:

    render: function () {
        return this.setElement($(renderTemplate()));
    }

There you are, stick that in your parent View class and now you don't "have" to specify anything in your view (which, again, you don't have to anyway).

Also, there's no logic in that part, it's just a declarative mapping of your DOM root.

(the caveats of the guy who answered on SO still apply, this will not handle re-rendering as-is and a broken template generating multiple roots will not work correctly)