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Archive for July, 2008

Correct Use of DIV and SPAN

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

There are two generic (and semantically empty) containers you can readily pull into your markup to achieve layout and presentation effects. These are the <div> and <span> elements. It’s well worth your while to understand their purpose because they are definately not entirely interchangeable, as some developers seem to imagine. Thus, two separate elements in the specification.

A <div> is a block level container. We often use them to create sections within our layout and create structure around the content. Its purpose is to contain block level elements like paragraphs, headings and lists. The trick is in not over-utilising the <div> when it’s not needed. If you have an unordered list that becomes your horizontal navigation bar, for example, you don’t need to put it into a <div> – it’s already a block level element, and a block level container of list items. Think of them as empty meaningless containers for areas of your markup that you’d like to group together. Perhaps you want one with an id of #content, one with an id of #sidebar and of course a third with an id of #footer.

On the other hand <span> is an inline generic container. Equally as semantically empty. This means within a block level element like a paragraph you might want to treat an inline section of the text as a special container. For example:

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Steven Clark Steven Clark - the stand up guy on this site

My name is Steven Clark (aka nortypig) and my passions are business, web development, photography and writing. My current CV [PDF 775KB] is available for download. Currently I'm completing my 2 final units of a post-graduate university degree of MBA (Journalism and Media Studies) at the University of Tasmania.

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Light Science and Magic by Hunter, Biver and Fuqua - cover

The time has come for me to get more involved in upping my technical photography skills if I hope to embark on a Master of Fine Art and Design (Photography) next year. To that end my first book is the highly recommended Light Science & Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting (Third Edition) by Fil Hunter, Steven Biver and Paul Fuqua. What really differentiates this book is the comprehensive set of exercises and the detailed explanation of the underlying science of light in the real world that encompasses the reader's journey.