Are these DIVs really necessary?

Question

I sometimes find myself creating a div which serves no other purpose than to hold another element.

For example when creating a menu, I would create a div and assign it a background colour, position etc. Then within it I would create an unordered list.

I could surely assign all the properties I assigned to the DIV to the UL and not use a div at all.

Any ideas of what is best practice and reasons for it.

Thanks

Zenna

Answer 1

DIVs can be useful for grouping semantically related elements. If you are simply wrapping a single element that is also a block element, then you are simply adding bytes to the file.