Divitis

In HTML authoring, Divitis is the use of generic, semantically-meaningless container elements and in place of structural HTML elements. The term came up with HTML 4.01 and authoring techniques involving the separation of presentation (Cascading Style Sheets) and content (HTML).

Because CSS would allow imitating the behavior of certain HTML elements and styling not possible with the traditional non-CSS approach, some authors would not simply stop abusing elements for creating certain effects, but replace them with the generic, semantic-free container elements and . A typical case of Divitis would be a page using the element for headers and in place of other, semantically appropriate, elements or overloaded with empty elements or ones containing only a single child element.

The phrase became more widely known with the release of the book Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman, a popular CSS guru.