The <div> and <span> elements allow you to group several elements to create sections or subsections of a page. On their own, they will not affect the appearance of a page, but they are commonly used with CSS to allow you to attach a style to a section of a page . For example, you might want to put all of the footnotes on a page within a <div> element to indicate that all of the elements within that <div> element relate to the footnotes. You might then attach a style to this <div> element so that they appear using a special set of style rules.
The <div> element is used to group block-level elements:
The <span> element, on the other hand, can be used to group inline elements only. So, if you had a part of a sentence or paragraph you wanted to group, you could use the <span> element. Here you can see that I have added a <span> element to indicate which content refers to an inventor. It contains both a bold element and some text: .
On its own, this would have no effect at all on how the document looks visually, but it does add extra meaning to the markup, which now groups the related elements. This grouping can either be used by a processing application, can be used to attach special styles to these elements using CSS rules.
The <div> and <span> elements can carry all of the universal attributes and UI event attributes, as well as the deprecated align attribute (which is no longer available in Strict XHTML 1.0).
The <div> element is used to group block-level elements:
The <span> element, on the other hand, can be used to group inline elements only. So, if you had a part of a sentence or paragraph you wanted to group, you could use the <span> element. Here you can see that I have added a <span> element to indicate which content refers to an inventor. It contains both a bold element and some text: .
On its own, this would have no effect at all on how the document looks visually, but it does add extra meaning to the markup, which now groups the related elements. This grouping can either be used by a processing application, can be used to attach special styles to these elements using CSS rules.
The <div> and <span> elements can carry all of the universal attributes and UI event attributes, as well as the deprecated align attribute (which is no longer available in Strict XHTML 1.0).
