只是想添加一些历史背景关于span和div是如何产生的

跨度历史:

On July 3, 1995, Benjamin C. W. Sittler proposes a generic text container tag for applying styles to certain blocks of text. The rendering is neutral except if used in conjunction of a stylesheet. There is a debate around versus about readability, meaning. Bert Bos is mentioning the extensibility nature of the element through the class attribute (with values such as city, person, date, etc.). Paul Prescod is worried that both elements will be abused. He is opposed to text mentionning that "any new element should be on an old one" and adding "If we create a tag with no semantics it can be used anywehere without ever being wrong. We must force authors to properly tag the semantics of their document. We must force editor vendors to make that choice explicit in their interfaces."

-来源(w3 wiki)

在RFC草案中引入了span:

首先，一个普通的骗局 需要tainer来携带LANG和BIDI属性 在没有其他要素的情况下;《SPAN ele》 Ment就是为此目的而引入的。

-来源(IETF草案)

div的历史:

DIV元素可用于将HTML文档构造为划分的层次结构。 .．. 的支持之前，Netscape就引入了CENTER HTML 3.0 DIV元素。它被保留在HTML 3.2中，因为它具有 广泛的部署。

HTML 3.2规格

In a nutshell, both elements arose out of a need for a more semantically-generic container. Span was proposed as a more generic replacement for a <text> element to style text. Div was proposed as a generic way to divide pages and had the added benefit of replacing the <center> tag for center-aligning content. Div has always been a block element because of its history as a page divider. Span has always been an inline element because its original purpose was text styling and today div and span have both arrived at being generic elements with default block and inline display properties respectively.

为了完整起见，我建议你这样思考:

There are lots of block elements (linebreaks before and after) defined in HTML, and lots of inline tags (no linebreaks). But in modern HTML all elements are supposed to have meanings: a <p> is a paragraph, an <li> is a list item, etc., and we're supposed to use the right tag for the right purpose -- not like in the old days when we indented using <blockquote> whether the content was a quote or not. So, what do you do when there is no meaning to the thing you're trying to do? There's no meaning to a 400px-wide column, is there? You just want your column of text to be 400px wide because that suits your design. For this reason, they added two more elements to HTML: the generic, or meaningless elements <div> and <span>, because otherwise, people would go back to abusing the elements which do have meanings.

我想说，如果你懂一点西班牙语，看看这一页，在那里有适当的解释。

然而，一个快速的定义是，div是用于划分部分，span是用于将某种样式应用到另一个块元素中的元素，如div。

这里已经有了很好的、详细的答案，但没有可视化的例子，所以这里有一个简单的例子:

<div>这是一个div <div>这是一个div <div>这是一个div <span>这是一个span <span>这是一个span <span>这是一个span

<div>是块标记，而<span>是行内标记。

真正重要的区别已经在克里斯的回答中提到了。然而，这并不是对每个人都有明显的影响。

作为一个内联元素，<span>只能包含其他内联元素。因此下面的代码是错误的:

<span><p>This is a paragraph</p></span>

上面的代码无效。要包装块级元素，必须使用另一个块级元素(例如<div>)。另一方面，<div>只能在块级元素合法的地方使用。

此外，这些规则在(X)HTML中是固定的，它们不会因CSS规则的存在而改变!所以下面的代码也是错的!

<span style="display: block"><p>Still wrong</p></span>
<span><p style="display: inline">Just as wrong</p></span>

正如在其他回答中提到的，默认情况下div将被呈现为块元素，而span将在其上下文中内联呈现。但两者都没有任何语义价值;它们的存在允许您对任何给定的内容应用样式和标识。使用样式，可以使div像span一样，反之亦然。

div的一个有用的样式是内联块

例子:

http://dustwell.com/div-span-inline-block.html CSS显示:内联vs内联块

我曾在游戏网页项目中使用内联块取得了巨大的成功。