Why is <input> empty?

With almost all HTML tags the information that is actually displayed to 
the user by the browser comes from the content of the tag.  The only 
exception I can think of is <input> where the text displayed to the user 
comes from an attribute.  This results in some really exceptional 
behavior including that you cannot have an </input> end tag.  I 
appreciate that when HTML was first implemented that was the way the tag 
worked, but I do not understand why a quarter century later it still has 
that exceptional behavior. Why to I have to code <input type='input' 
value='12345'> when <input type='input'>12345</input> would be 
consistent with every other tag.  Related to this was the decision to 
create a new <button> tag, largely to permit specifying the displayed 
content of the element, rather than just permitting including the 
content with the <input type='button'> tag.
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James Cobban webmaster@jamescobban.net 
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