Understanding the purpose of the <div> tag in HTML

Question

Could you please explain in detail the purpose and usage of the <div> tag in HTML? How can it be utilized to structure and organize content on a web page? Additionally, are there any specific attributes or properties that can be applied to the <div> tag to customize its appearance or behavior? Thank you for your guidance.

Answer 1

There is no use for <div> in pure html; it's just for marking and/or containing things to use with CSS and JS. This also addresses your last question: you can use the usual assortment of CSS style options to customize appearance (via "style" attributes or in a separate css stylesheet, as normal) and JS to customize behavior (using the <script> tag, with or without an external js file, again as normal).

Answer 2

Think of divs as generic block display containers. They don't have any semantic meaning, so if you are designing a page where users might include people who access the page through nonconventional methods like screen readers, then it is better to replace them with more access friendly tags.

https://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_semantic_elements.asp

https://medium.com/adalab/the-importance-of-semantic-html-78e74fb75ff0

But if you're just doing a personal project or quick mockup, divs are very handy containers.

Answer 3

Div tag is just a container. You can add a class id to your div tag, and add a content inside it, then go to your CSS file, and style all the elements inside your div tag once, by using the div class name, without doing them separately. Here is an example:
<div class="content">
<h1>Hi</h1>
<p>Hello</>
</div>

styles.css:
.content{
color: red;
background-color: black;
}

Here you don't need to add different styling rules for your heading and paragraph, as you have done that inside one styling area. This is really useful, if you want to style different elements, exactly similar, to each other, but it is not recommended, if you want to add multiple similar tag, in your HTML, and make one of those tag' styling different than the other, as that would apply the styling rule to no tags, in your webpage.