Talk:Div and span

Untitled
I'm not sure this page should exist, but I'll clean it up anyways. - Crenner 03:27, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia span and div
Where can I find which span and div classes can be used with Wikipedia? --Abdull 15:32, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Help:HTML in wikitext. --Max 14:00, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Does not actually answer the question and sends people back here. — Llywelyn II   04:17, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Some more explanation could be useful
I don't get an idea of why one should need to label elements within a web page with "id" or "class". I wouldn't mind a bit more educational content. The examples with a name and a date don't say why anyone would want to put labels on those elements and what one can do with this. __meco 19:30, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Very good questions, meco. I've added some stuff to the artticle to try to answer them.  Hope it helps. --Nigelj 21:09, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

Too Conversational
This article offers too much speculation about the future of the World Wide Web and such that is not particularly useful to the topic at hand. Much of this content is unnecessary and meandering. Can you cut out some of the speculation?
 * I think that in particular the parts about voice pronunciation of HTML are unrelated and could be more purposefully addressed in a seperate article on the topic. The article seems to go on and on about the topic even though it's not so much related to the topic of the article.
 * -FoxMajik 23:52, 9 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Please see the brief exchange with 'meco' just above before being tempted to delete large parts of the article. There is no speculation in this article: it was expanded because there was more to say.  Every time someone says "I'd like to know more", we don't always find knowledgeable contributors to add relevant and informative detail. But every time someone says, "I got bored reading this because I don't know much about the topic, and don't really need to know too much about it" I think it's very counter-productive just to delete what we have.


 * It is true that there could and should be many more references and citations for all the important points made here. These are available from many places. Some starting points are http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/, http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.5.4 and http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#the-div . I hope to find the time soon to do some more work here. --Nigelj (talk) 21:31, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

The speculations made are highly relevant - speculation about possible future implementation of the document being formatted are very important when designing in a medium where content will almost invariably outlive the technology presently used to parse it. The article explains very well the importance of this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.7.190.151 (talk) 01:19, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Too technical
A "Too technical" tag has been added to this article. Taken in conjunction with the "Too conversational" complaint just above, I would suggest that that may mean that we have the balance about right. (And that you can't please all of the people all of the time, of course :-)

More seriously, this is a technical and complex topic if the reader is encouraged to think about it to any depth. That, coupled with a slightly discursive style, may hopefully encourage many but our least interested readers to think more deeply about the topic, in a wider context than it is normally given. By wider context I mean
 * in terms of users other than the normal web-visitor :including search engine bots etc,
 * in terms of disability discrimination :e.g. screen-readers
 * in wide timescales :many web pages, that are currently still readable and important, were added to the WWW up to 10 or more years ago

I hope that rather than complaining with simple template-tags, more interested wikipedians may consider researching some of the sources and helping improve the overall quality of the article themselves. --Nigelj (talk) 21:46, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
 * This article is terribly technical. Readers are not going to ponder this page, they will simply give up and go elsewhere to find information. Like me, right now. Ikip (talk) 00:14, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Separate CSS and text to speech
The section "Styling with CSS" covers two different topics. I think it should be split into two.

--UW @ 69.91.160.228 (talk) 15:44, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

When added to HTML?
When were span and div added to HTML? I don't remember ever hearing about them when I learned HTML in the mid-1990s. --JHP (talk) 07:33, 20 November 2008 (UTC)
 * div was standardised in HTML 3.2 (1997); span in HTML 4.0 (1999). They had both existed previously in drafts.
 * span may have been introduced in the IETF HTML internationalization draft 01, 1995-09-25 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-html-i18n-01) (p18);
 * div was present in the HTML 3.0 draft in March 1995 (which never became a recommendation but led on to HTML 3.2).
 * As parts of a standard, both were present in CSS1 in 1996 (recommendation at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1-961217).
 * These are the earliest mentions of these elements I've found. If there's more concrete information somewhere it could be usefully added to this article imo. Anihl (talk) 01:57, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Deletion?
I notice that User:Ringbang recently blanked the whole article. I also note that he has recently been reminded of the correct procedures for nominating articles for deletion. Hopefully, the same considerations can be applied here. --Nigelj (talk) 22:24, 31 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Part of his argument was that it was Original Research and/or a 'manual'/'guidebook'. This page explains why and how the items are used, but that does not make it a 'howto' page. Without examples of usage, the description if the elements is incomplete. Hymek (talk) 15:10, 3 April 2009 (UTC)


 * This article should be merged with HTML element. Too much of an uncited guidebook without discussion of history or significance. Plastikspork (talk) 00:47, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
 * HTML element is already a large article. The idea is to be splitting things out of parent articles to discuss in more detail, where there is more to say and an interested audience (as there currently are for all things web-related), not merging them back in. If you want more discussion of history or significance, have you considered researching and adding that yourself? --Nigelj (talk) 14:34, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, I did do some research, and I concluded that there was no interesting history beyond what should be included in an article about HTML elements. Thanks! 05:19, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

As mentioned elsewhere, I think it is useful to have an article on this topic. My reasoning is that it is only one of several possible sub-pages that could or already do exist, and if even a minimal version of each of these were included in HTML Elements, it would end up unmanageably or unreadably large. (I rather think it already is.) Also, while it would be possible to highlight some of the issues around the span and div tags, it would be difficult to draw a full comparison without repetition. That said, I agree that this article should be neither a how-to nor contain original research. (Though we must be careful about originality; some of this is article is new to me but not therefore original, and it’s difficult to prove the negative). A useful way ahead might be to ask for views on what precisely in the article as it stands might constitute either type of content. (And suggest references for the rest!) For example, I am dubious about the Practical Usage section as it currently exists, as: That said, there is content there which I think does form a valid part of this article, if it can be teased out, and perhaps more which might usefully be added to Semantic Web. And then there's the testing tools info which is altogether new to me and since I don't feel qualified to pass judgement, I'd happily leave it where it is. Anyone else? Anihl (talk) 00:50, 17 April 2009 (UTC)
 * it opens with an example which is really about semantics, for which it provides a specific subsection – but which curiously uses div where address would be more semantic;
 * the Styling with CSS section is
 * too specific – CSS is not the only stylesheet language;
 * [NPOV] it presents the microformats argument without alternative views;
 * the Semantic Clarity section:
 * is a generic topic which applies in part to many HTML elements and more broadly to XML languages;
 * is covered more fully in other articles, but is more in-depth here than seems necessary to me for an understanding of the span and div elements;
 * [NPOV] presents class/id on span/div as the solution for semantic requirements; but there are other approaches; comes over as advocacy for microformats;
 * it is touching on the future rather than sticking to established practice; which may be acceptable in some circumstances but I think it should be more clearly stated.
 * the Access From Code section:
 * gives a somewhat dubious example (a whole div – with an id – for a price tag? Valid HTML, certainly, but it's not how I'd teach it – never use an id where you might one day want two of something);
 * is also generic information – the id of any element can be accessed using the DOM;
 * is also specific to one language;
 * and finally, “Practical Usage” as a title is probably too close to the dreaded how-to for comfort.
 * This article should be moved to wikibooks. It is either a tutorial or nothing of interest. Macaldo (talk) 08:28, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Differences and default behavior
This section contains two examples which link to w3c pages -- these now link to the same place, a very long page, and it is not at all clear what should be pointed to.

Hymek (talk) 09:43, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

"Styling with CSS"
I use Kompozer (Nvu) for editing a website and in its standard (WYSIWYG) mode, block-selecting a number of words in a paragraph and selecting 'italic' or 'bold' from the toolbar will enclose the text in a span with  or   but no class identifier. The current article does not suggest that this is possible.

Hymek (talk) 09:52, 5 May 2009 (UTC)


 * It’s certainly possible, but not necessarily desirable.  An external or embedded stylesheet (where these can be used) can easily contain either:
 * i { font-style: italic; }
 * .i { font-style: italic; }
 * – which can then be used as either of:
 * The examples from your editor are valid html/css, but there are an infinite number of possible valid but sub-optimal examples that could be quoted ... of course, that may be be a point worth making. ;-)  Anihl (talk) 15:04, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The examples from your editor are valid html/css, but there are an infinite number of possible valid but sub-optimal examples that could be quoted ... of course, that may be be a point worth making. ;-)  Anihl (talk) 15:04, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The examples from your editor are valid html/css, but there are an infinite number of possible valid but sub-optimal examples that could be quoted ... of course, that may be be a point worth making. ;-)  Anihl (talk) 15:04, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The examples from your editor are valid html/css, but there are an infinite number of possible valid but sub-optimal examples that could be quoted ... of course, that may be be a point worth making. ;-)  Anihl (talk) 15:04, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

What do DIV and SPAN mean?
I have used these two tags for more than a decade but I have never given it much thought. Is DIV an abbreviation of "divider"? Anyone know? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.25.184.131 (talk) 11:12, 4 May 2010 (UTC)


 * I think of it as a "division" and something that "spans" across something, that is letters. - Random Guy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.96.180.188 (talk) 13:28, 30 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Agreed.  refers to a span of characters (within one paragraph), and   refers to a division of the document (across any amount of characters and paragraphs). — ¾-10 03:27, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

much better explanation here
http://html.net/tutorials/css/lesson8.php so as you can see, the wiki article is lots of words, that don't really explain it at the right level my personal adivce, throw out the current article and get permission to copy the tutorial or something like just my two cents — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.195.10.169 (talk) 22:42, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree that the current article is essentially industry jargon and should be scrapped in favor of another written in English. Could not care less about the editor's opinion about the suitability of versus . What I need to know is how to deal with div clear issues that screw up Wikipedia formatting. —  Llywelyn II   03:44, 24 February 2015 (UTC)