What is the difference between HTML tags <div> and <span>?

  • div is a block element
  • span is an inline element.

This means that to use them semantically, divs should be used to wrap sections of a document, while spans should be used to wrap small portions of text, images, etc.

For example:

<div>This a large main division, with <span>a small bit</span> of spanned text!</div>

Note that it is illegal to place a block-level element within an inline element, so:

<div>Some <span>text that <div>I want</div> to mark</span> up</div>

...is illegal.

EDIT: As of HTML5, some block elements can be placed inside of some inline elements. See the MDN reference here for a pretty clear listing. The above is still illegal, as <span> only accepts phrasing content, and <div> is flow content.

You asked for some concrete examples, so is one taken from my bowling website, BowlSK:

<div id="header">
  <div id="userbar">
    Hi there, <span class="username">Chris Marasti-Georg</span> |
    <a href="/edit-profile.html">Profile</a> |
    <a href="https://www.bowlsk.com/_ah/logout?...">Sign out</a>
  </div>
  <h1><a href="/">Bowl<span class="sk">SK</span></a></h1>
</div>

Ok, what's going on?

At the top of my page, I have a logical section, the "header". Since this is a section, I use a div (with an appropriate id). Within that, I have a couple of sections: the user bar and the actual page title. The title uses the appropriate tag, h1. The userbar, being a section, is wrapped in a div. Within that, the username is wrapped in a span, so that I can change the style. As you can see, I have also wrapped a span around 2 letters in the title - this allows me to change their color in my stylesheet.

Also note that HTML5 includes a broad new set of elements that define common page structures, such as article, section, nav, etc.

Section 4.4 of the HTML 5 working draft lists them and gives hints as to their usage. HTML5 is still a working spec, so nothing is "final" yet, but it is highly doubtful that any of these elements are going anywhere. There is a javascript hack that you will need to use if you want to style these elements in some older version of IE - You need to create one of each element using document.createElement before any of those elements are specified in your source. There are a bunch of libraries that will take care of this for you - a quick Google search turned up html5shiv.


Just for the sake of completeness, I invite you to think about it like this:

  • There are lots of block elements (linebreaks before and after) defined in HTML, and lots of inline tags (no linebreaks).
  • But in modern HTML all elements are supposed to have meanings: a <p> is a paragraph, an <li> is a list item, etc., and we're supposed to use the right tag for the right purpose -- not like in the old days when we indented using <blockquote> whether the content was a quote or not.
  • So, what do you do when there is no meaning to the thing you're trying to do? There's no meaning to a 400px-wide column, is there? You just want your column of text to be 400px wide because that suits your design.
  • For this reason, they added two more elements to HTML: the generic, or meaningless elements <div> and <span>, because otherwise, people would go back to abusing the elements which do have meanings.

There are already good, detailed answers here, but no visual examples, so here's a quick illustration:

difference between div and span

<div>This is a div.</div>
<div>This is a div.</div>
<div>This is a div.</div>
<span>This is a span.</span>
<span>This is a span.</span>
<span>This is a span.</span>

<div> is a block tag, while <span> is an inline tag.

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