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I’m wondering what the difference is between ‘span’ and the new HTML5 tags ‘figure’ and ‘area’.
What is the intended purpose of each, and what are the appropriate uses? For example, I frequently use a ‘span’ with a background image rather than an ‘img’ tag to prevent the image from being selectable; what is the best element to accomplish this?
<span>is an inline element, used essentially like an inline div. It is a “generic wrapper for phrasing content that by itself does not represent anything.” (W3C spec)<figure>is used alongside the<figcaption>element to mark up something that “can be moved away from the main flow of the document without affecting the document’s meaning.” (W3C spec)<area>is for making image maps, and is used inside a<map>element.In your case, I’d recommend using a div instead, or even an img tag with a transparent png as the content with a background image. You could use an img tag with user-select:none; with the usual prefixes instead to stop an image being selectable.