<br><br> versus </div><div>

**felgall** · Mar 29, 2008 22:00

Originally Posted by winterheat

so if you post something, i reply saying it is meaningless, you will feel what i say doesn't really apply to you? maybe you have a different way of thinking.

For a beginner who doesn't know the answer to the question yet, no question is meaningless.

Anyone past the stage of beginner with web page design for the 21st century knows that HTML defines the content and CSS defines the appearance. As such asking an appearance question about HTML is meaningless since that isn't what HTML is for and, apart from the beginner just starting out, 21st Century web designers know that.

As such my comment implied that in asking the question you are presumably a beginner where it comes to 21st century web design. This could mean that are just starting out or it could mean that have been using 20th century web design methods without realising that they are now obsolete. I made no assumptions as to which of these applied to you. The alternative that you actually do know 21st century web design and deliberately asked what you knew to be a meaningless question is the alternative that I did not believe applied.

In any case arguing over what you have interpreted my comments to mean does not get you any further in finding out how to do what you were asking about in the first place which was about how to insert vertical whitespace into your content - which is done by applying the appropriate padding and margins to block level content and by applying an appropriate line-height to inline content.

**winterheat** · Mar 29, 2008 22:32

Originally Posted by felgall

For a beginner who doesn't know the answer to the question yet, no question is meaningless.

Anyone past the stage of beginner with web page design for the 21st century knows that HTML defines the content and CSS defines the appearance. As such asking an appearance question about HTML is meaningless since that isn't what HTML is for and, apart from the beginner just starting out, 21st Century web designers know that.

As such my comment implied that in asking the question you are presumably a beginner where it comes to 21st century web design. This could mean that are just starting out or it could mean that have been using 20th century web design methods without realising that they are now obsolete. I made no assumptions as to which of these applied to you. The alternative that you actually do know 21st century web design and deliberately asked what you knew to be a meaningless question is the alternative that I did not believe applied.

In any case arguing over what you have interpreted my comments to mean does not get you any further in finding out how to do what you were asking about in the first place which was about how to insert vertical whitespace into your content - which is done by applying the appropriate padding and margins to block level content and by applying an appropriate line-height to inline content.

how many times do i need to tell you my purpose is NOT TO CREATE vertical spacing but to wonder why div and br work that way. It is for experimentation and not for a practical purpose.

I keep dropping an apple and wonder why the apple will fall to the ground, and you come up to me saying, NO THE RIGHT WAY is to catch it using a basket or just to catch it by hand and eat it. I flash some light beam to the mirror on a train to see if the speed of light changes, and you come up to me and say NO THE RIGHT WAY to use a flash light is to flash it at night to see clearly and the right way to use the train is to travel to a different place. It is a 16th century technology and every beginner should know that. BravO!!!

and i know HTML is for content and CSS is for visual display or other media. But whether a space is included in the content DOES AFFECT how the visual display is, doesn't it? First what becomes the content must be well defined, and then you talk about the visual display of it. If you don't know what the content is, talking about the rendering the content doesn't make sense. So you can save your lecture about the 21st century for yourself.

**felgall** · Mar 30, 2008 00:35

What browsers do in that situation is irrelevant since the stylesheet will override it anyway. Presumably different browsers all handle it slightly differently. So in your experimenting have you tested to see how the following browsers handle it?

Advanced Navigator
Alligator
AlphaX
Amaya
AWeb II
AOL
Arachne
Atlantis
AJW Browser
Barque
Beonex
Blake
BrowseX
BumperCar
Camino
Cello
Cheetah
Chimera
Cineast
Coda
Compuserve
Conkeror
CuriosityAndVanity
Deer Park
Demeter
DeskBrowse
DesktopBrowser
DEVONthink
DictJuggler
Dillo
Echo
Elinks
Encompass
Epiphany
Flock
Galleon
Grail
Hana
Hazlce
HotJAVA
I-Comm
I-View
iBrowser
iCab
ICE browser
InterGo
InternetPal
Internet Safari
Internet Workhorse
iPhoney
iSurf
Jazilla
JEDict
Journler
K-Meleon
KidsBrowser
KioskBrowser
Konqueror
Kylie
LanderBrowse
Light
Lightbrowser
Light Mode Browser
Links
lolifox
Lynx
Lynxlet
Madfox
maileR
MiniBrowser
Minimo
MiniWeb
Money
Monocle
NagaraBrowser
Nemo
NeoPlanet
NetCruiser
NetFront
NetNewsWire
Netrick
Nova X
Odysseys
OmniWeb
OnTour
OSB-Browser
Paparazzi!
Peel
Pepper Keeper
Postino
Prevue
PT Browser
Pyleon
Radon
Recherche
retawq
Scamper
Scavenger
Scourge
Seamonkey
Seemore's Safety Browser
Selenium
SchreibtischBrowser
Sesame Navigator
Shiira
Skipton
Slife
SlipKnot
SnapWeb
Softerm Plus
soho Notes
Songbird
Split Browser
Star Office
STiK/CAB
Sunrise
surfDude
SurfIt!
Tango
Tiber
TkWWW
Tominated Browser
Tool Kit Browser
TrailBlazer
TubeTV
TvTube
UdiWWW
Videobox
Vienna
viewML
Voyager
XBrowser
Xtorrent
Xyle scope
w3m
w3mmee
WaMCom
Wazilla
wDesk
WebExplorer
Web Stalker
Webstractor
Web TV
webXkiosk
WidgetBrowse
wKiosk
xsmiles
Yelp
Zen
Zeta

The above 150 browsers are of course only a small sample of the browsers that are available but is a big enough sized sample that you ought to have some meaningful results by the end of testing that many. Of course if you decide to test a different 150 or even 500 or more browsers so as to get an even better sample of what they do then you may find the answer to your question.

**winterheat** · Mar 30, 2008 03:22

i think it needs to have the content defined first. if you have an extra space in the content, then stylesheet isn't go to help too much... or maybe it can use some special trick to not render the space using CSS, but it is not elegant, and if the user define other styles, the space can still be exposed.

Listing 150 browers here isn't going to help. You have got the basic concept mixed up.

And even in situations where rendering could be different in various browsers, we just test the top 4 or 5 browsers so that it works most of the time. If you don't know that, go back to Junior College and take some class.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:U...sers_Chart.png

**tauperkin** · Mar 30, 2008 11:19

break doesn't need a closing tag in html and is perfectly valid. Its xhtml that has self closing tags.

True. Realized that after I posted. I guess at this point I'm just used to writing XHTML that validates.

I don't know why I keep punishing myself by reading this thread, but it seems to me that the answer to the question is that <br> is an inline element and <div> is a block element.

<br> inserts a blank line. It's a line break.

<div> helps you add structure and logic to your page. If you have three<div></div>, which means that you have created three sections but don't have anything in them, then they aren't going to create blank space because that isn't what <div> does. It's a container.

But, if you then put in your   you have something in that container so you see a line break but you really aren't creating a line break per se, it just displays that way because there is something in the div. But you wouldn't use a div to create vertical space.

Even better, if you're using an id on the div and a style sheet, you can control padding and margins, giving you the desired spacing between elements.

Oh well...

**felgall** · Mar 30, 2008 12:42

Well winterheat wants to experiment with what the HTML does if you don't style it and therefore testing in obscure browsers that you wouldn't bother with for a real web page seems an appropriate starting point since the behaviour of the most popular browsers is well documented and therefore no experimentation with those browsers would really be required, all you'd have to do is read up on what the browser does in already written reports.

Anyway, it seems that nothing anyone suggests here is ever going to be considered to be acceptable help since what was actually asked has been answered over and over and has not been considered a satisfactory answer to the question. Perhaps the question needs to be reworded in such a way that all of us who are not the super advanced experts in the field that winterheat is can at least understand what is the question actually is supposed to be about since it is obvious that we are all misunderstanding it.

**tauperkin** · Mar 30, 2008 13:32

Anyway, it seems that nothing anyone suggests here is ever going to be considered to be acceptable help since what was actually asked has been answered over and over and has not been considered a satisfactory answer to the question. Perhaps the question needs to be reworded in such a way that all of us who are not the super advanced experts in the field that winterheat is can at least understand what is the question actually is supposed to be about since it is obvious that we are all misunderstanding it.

I think you're right, felgall