Elements of Style

Our XHTML documents by themselves are nothing but a bunch of content containers.  To begin to place this content where we want on the screen, we need to separate and sort our content (this is where the organization stressed in Ch. 7 will come into play).

We will use special XHTML tags to group tags of associated content.  We will literally "wrap" our tags with these grouping tags in order to accomplish this.  The purpose of doing this is two-fold.

1. It will allow us to better organize our raw content when it comes time for future editting.
2. It will allow us to place styels on sets of content.

XHTML Grouping Tags

DIV

<div>items grouped together in div</div>

Used to group items together in a division. Most often used for alignment of material on the page. By default, ends with new line/character return.

SPAN

<span>items grouped together in span</span>

Works exactly like the <div> tag without the new line/character return.