SPAN: the HTML container that does not alter your document

The span tag is the only HTML inline container tag: unless you apply CSS to it, it's simply an inline tag that doesn't alter the way your document is displayed.

Please also note that you could use a div tag and apply CSS display:inline; to achieve the same result:

<span>Some content</span>

is equivalent to:

<div style="display:inline">Some content</div>

 

Read this for more details: http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/text-level-semantics.html#the-span-element

 

Hope this helps :)

 

My original answer on StackOverflow is at: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30795488/is-there-an-html-tag-that-does-not-have-any-effect-on-an-html-document/30795821#30795821