Using div and span

I am new to SEO coding. My HTML skills are fine, and microdata makes sense. The question I have is if it is proper to use double span commands instead of div and span? Like this:

<span itemscope itemtype=""><span itemprop=""> </span></span>

Does this even work, or does the itemscope need to be in a hierarchy? Is there a 'best practice'? Thanks in advance for your help!
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I found my answer when I learned about nesting the data. I didn't see a way to strike through my original post. I also didn't see a way to delete it. That's why this post is goofy.

 

All else being equal, I don't think it matters what elements you add the microdata attributes to.
You would of course want to use the most semantic tags/elements available. There's some debate
over how the "new" semantic HTML5 tags impact SEO (whether at all), however, I don't think it
would hurt to have as semantic and as clean code as possible.

As far as I know, div and span don't have any semantic meaning and so you can really use any you
like. The difference maybe is if you need the stuff be block-level then I'd probably use a div outer
wrapper instead of span. If inline level is required then you can just go with span. You can nest span
elements. That will validate fine. But this is mostly moot as you can just set display:block in your
stylesheet anyway...

*All else being equal == your markup is well structured and standards compliant (refer to W3C).

**Edited to add:
Make sure to run your markup through one of the numerous microdata structuring tools (Google's is decent)
and the data being read is as expected.

Good luck! [personally, hand coding microdata in the dev stage sucks for me ;-)]

 

Thanks for the information. The inline issue was what prompted the question, so thanks for addressing that as well.

[personally, hand coding microdata in the dev stage sucks for me ;-)]
Are there other alternatives? Reliable apps or programs?

 

Thanks for sharing such a useful and important information about using span and div...