HTML blocks are segments of code that define areas of a webpage. Block-level elements have more attributes than inline elements and can be nested within each other. Understanding the difference is important for working with HTML and CSS.
A HyperText Markup Language (HTML) block, broadly speaking, is a segment of HTML code that refers to a defined area of the finished document when viewed by a program such as a web browser. The importance of an HTML block is seen when you assign different attributes to elements, because many styles and other definitions can only be assigned to block-level elements. The opposite of an HTML block is inline code, which must always be nested within a block to work.
An example of the definition of an HTML block is a paragraph of text on a website. When the page is viewed in a web browser, the paragraph appears with a blank line between it and the previous paragraph, and with a blank line after the paragraph and the next display element. Within the page’s HTML code, the paragraph is surrounded by HTML tags that define it as a paragraph block. These tags surrounding the paragraph establish everything between them as a block of HTML.
An HTML block can be nested inside another block. In fact, almost all tags are indeed nested within the body tags required by an HTML document. Conversely, an inline segment must be nested within a block because it requires the elements they contain if it is to work. An example of an inline tag is a piece of text that should appear in bold.
The difference between a block-level HTML element and an inline element is one of the key understandings needed to work with HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS). This is mainly because there are some standard style attributes and other parameters described as applying only to block-level elements or only to row-level elements. In general, inline elements do not contain the same editable attributes as block-level elements.
An example of the difference between an HTML block-level attribute and an inline-level attribute is the alignment option. At the block level, such as a division tag or the start of a bulleted list, text or images within the block can be set to snap to the left, right, or center of an area. If the alignment attribute is applied to an inline element, nothing will happen, because it is not an available line-level option.
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