What Is a "div" Tag/Element?

A "div" element is a block element that you can use a container of flow elements (flow elements are really the superset of both inline elements and block elements). By default, "div" elements will be treated as paragraphs by most browsers. Here are basic rules about an "div" element:

• "div" elements are block elements.
• "div" elements can have PCDATA as contents.
• "div" elements can have inline elements as sub-elements.
• "div" elements can have block elements as sub-elements.
• A "div" element will be displayed as a paragraph by most browsers.

Here is a tutorial example of "div" elements:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
 <head>
  <title>DIV Elements as Paragraphs</title>
 </head>
 <body>
  <h4>XHTML Interview Questions</h4>
  <div style="background-color: #eeeeee; padding: 4px;">
   Q: What is the number one advantage of using XHTML?
  </div>
  <div style="background-color: #ffeeff; padding: 4px;">
   A: XHTML documents are well-formed XML documents.
   This allows your documents to be processed by any XML 
   applications.</div>
  <div style="background-color: #eeeeee; padding: 4px;">
   Q: What is most difficult part when converting 
   a HTML document into an XHTML document?</div>
  <div style="background-color: #ffeeff; padding: 4px;">
   A: The most difficult part is to make all elements
   are closed. XML documents requires that all elements
   must be closed with closing tags or with the extra "/" 
   at the end of the opening tag.</div>
 </body>
</html>

If you save the above document as div_elements.html and view it with Internet Explorer, you will see that each "div" is displayed as a paragraph as shown below:

⇒ Using HTML 'div' Elements with CSS Properties

⇐ HTML 'div' and 'span' elements

⇑ HTML 'div' and 'span' elements

⇑⇑ HTML Tutorials