Preserved Topic: div for dummies

I was wondering if anyone could explain the div tag to me. So far, I know you can use the align option with it and that you can use it with CSS. I assume the code would just be:

<div class="something">

Are there any other unique uses for the tag or unique ways of using it as I understand it?

It's basically a block version of <span>. You can set all of the usual parameters, including width, height, visibility, border, padding, margin, etc....

The advantage is that it doesn't come with any pre-defined look about it except that it's "block level" (which sorta means it creates an automatic line break at the beginning and end to separate it from everything else), so you can use it when you want to use CSS to define the way a block-level element looks from scratch.

Im kind of wondering the same thing. I want to know how to use those. Can't you use them for an alternative to tables? Does anyone have links to some good tutes on this topic?

Thanks guys. Now the follow up question is: what's span?

A span is the same thing as a Div except that it's inline instead of block-level. =)

Basically, a span tag is like a <b> or <i> or <font> tag, except that it doesn't *do* anything. It's completely void of effects. The text

hello <span>there</span> whats up

appears as

hello there whats up

the advantage to span is that you can use it to apply style sheets to a section of text that has no other way of describing its importance. For instance, if you think the word "cool" should always be blue, you can do

this is a <span class="myBlueColoredClass">cool</span> sentence.

So, yeah. That's what span does.

Ahh, I see.

So say I have three paragraphs that I want to be three different text colors with certain words in other colors. I could do it like this:

<div class="blue">

    blah <span class="red">blah</span> blah

</div>

<div class="green">

    blah <span class="red">blah</span> blah

</div>

<div class="orange">

    blah <span class="red">blah</span> blah

</div>

Now, I could do the same thing with the <p> tag so why would I use <div> over <p>?

<p> already has existing parameters (like margin) assigned to it. <div> does not.