Inline or block using chrome developer tools?

Question

Can we figure out whether an HTML element is inline or block using chrome developer tools?

Answer 1

"inline" and "block" aren't hugely useful categories to use in the first place.

In HTML 4 they were terms used in the DTD to group elements for quickly describing which elements could contain which other elements (and they often had exceptions).

In HTML 5 DTDs are gone and there are a different set of groups for elements.

There's no way to get the HTML categorisation of an element from the developer tools.

(At least not by default. Someone could put together a list of elements and how they are categorised in the specification and then write a developer tools plugin to display that information for the selected element. I'm not aware of anyone who has or why anyone would bother though.)

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Meanwhile in CSS, display and block are two of the original values for the display property . Almost all elements used to default to displaying as one or the other.

Today there are many more values as the specification has been rewritten to have (for example) display: inline-block instead of depending on exceptions to the rendering rules and new layout tools have been added like display: grid .

You can determine the display value for an element by looking in the Computed panel.