Find the HTML tag you were looking for
Saturday August 2, 2008
There are so many HTML tags available it's no wonder many Web designers succumb to divitis. After all, it's a lot easier to just use a div than to figure out which tag is right for the job. But with the About.com HTML Tag and XHTML Element Library you can look up tags in many different ways and find just the right tag for what you're trying to mark up. And you can make sure that you're using your tags correctly including what browsers support the tags.
Comments
Excelent, this is a great refference. Sure beats leafing through an old HTML book with broken bindings…
With the number of great reference sources online, it seems archaic to use a book. LOL
A good tutorial about web design!
I don’t like the term divitis. It carries negative connotations…like the term newbie. I’m surprised you subscribe to using it! The div element container was created to steer people away from using tables for layout. People do the samething with tables. Does that mean they have tablitis?
No, I don’t call using tables for layout “tableitis”. I don’t recommend using tables for layout, or nesting a lot of tables on a page as there are good reasons for not doing it.
I don’t call it “divitis” if you use divs for dividing up your page, as they were intended to be used.
But I do call it divitis when you see code similar to:
<div id="header1"><div class="bold">This is my Headline</div></div>
<div class="paragraph">And this is a paragraph</div>
<div class="paragraph">And this is another paragraph</div>
That is divitis because it is using the DIV tag for something it wasn’t intended to be used for. In my example, better tags to be used would be: <h1>, <strong> or <b>, and <p>
And you’re right, it does carry negative connotations, it’s meant to. This is not good coding.
Funny example! I’ve never seen a real life example of “divitis”, that would be pretty bad.
Wardell: well one of the sites I posted an SEO review on today had code very similar to that - no paragraph, headline, or emphasis tags to speak of - just divs (and a few other tags along with CSS styles). This site was interesting because the author also used the <font> tag throughout. I’m never really sure why people do that when they’re already going nuts with the div tag - maybe it was an old page that was being updated.