[Eclug] OT: What is up with the span tag

Jason Gurtz <jason at jasongurtz.com> wrote: On 8/16/2006 20:51, David Krings wrote:
> So, all of you wise men and women, can someone explain to me in simple 
> terms why the SPAN stuff fails and what this SPAN stuff is about anyhow 
> (yea, I read too many of Bob Pease's columns).

Yea, what the other Dave said...

As you found out, the  is not neccesary.  I did a little reading
up on it since I'm really not up on modern xhtml so much.  I guess it is
sort of an opposite of the  tag.

So a div is a container (literal box for positioning) that holds things
like  tags or tables (used for tabular data, NOT positioning!) or
, or whatever else.

A  on the other hand is an inline element used to apply styles (I
would guess typically text).  For example, maybe you have an extended
quotation inside of a paragraph of regular text.  Convention is to
indent the whole quotation and seperated by a blank line at top and
bottom of quoted text.  so you could wrap that quoted text with a 
to do that

Another way to do styles is where you use id= instead of class=  I'm not
sure why but probably has to do with doing dhtml stuff with ECMAscript
and whatnot

So whereas you'd see

span.myClass {
    stuff: value;
}

and use 

you could do

#myID {
    css-thingy: value;
}

and use 

Fun fun...

...Of course, just beware the IE hell of CSS inheritance and vast
wasteland of positioning bugs!

~Jason


The SPAN tag really is the exact same thing as a DIV, except that it is an inline version rather than a block level element.  It is useful for both applying styles like you mentioned, and for doing dhtml things such as changing text
 
 some stuff <span id=thisthing>some old stuff</span> and more

 <script>
 function someaction(){
 thisthing.innerHTML='this is better than the previous text';
 }
 </script>

 or you can use it for hiding/showing large (or small) chunks using
 thisthing.style.display='none';
 and 
 thisthing.style.display='inline';
 
 Again, it really is just the inline version of a DIV tag, and is used for all the same purposes when you want to do things inline.
 
 Randall
 		
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