What is the difference between <div align="center"> and <center>

Question

I've been coding for about a 6 months now, and last week I saw a <center> tag for the first time. It seams to me that most of the time when people want content aligned to the center, they use:

<div align="center">

but this causes major issues when using

<style>
    position: absolute;
<style>

the center

<center> 

tag appears to work for position absolute, but since I've never seen it before, i'm wondering why it's not more popular and what it's cross-browser support is like. I don't overly wanna add this to my site if something like IE is just gonna outright reject it. I'm mainly just trying to understand the differences between the two so I can figure which i would like to use in my code.

Answer 1

For an absolutely positioned element, you will need to set its width and use text-align: center to achieve the desired result.

.my-center{
  position: absolute;
  text-align: center;
  width: 100%;
}

<div class="my-center">
Center Aligned Text
</div>