HTML 5 is stewing. This articles summarises some basic improvements in the markup.
HTML 5 is more semantic. For example, the DIV element, which “represents nothing at all, and achieves nirvana with the Buddha in web documents” is replaced with specific elements, like HEADER, FOOTER and NAV.1 For example, instead of this:
<body> <div id="page"> <div id="header"> <span>My page</span>
HTML 5 markup looks like this:
<body> <br /> <header> <span>My page</span>
Flash! Less typing makes my fingers quiver.
Naming these elements is a good move, but it doesn’t address confusion about markup, which is sad. For example, should logos and company names use an H1 element? Some say yes, others no. So why not include a LOGO element in HTML 5?
And almost all websites have search fields, search results, a registration form, a log in form, tags or categories, etc. Why not include these elements as well?
They could even include an ADS element too. Imagine, a magic button that can hide advertisements at will!1
Also, there are specifications in the current document I don’t understand. They’ve created the NAV element and stated “The nav element represents a section of a page that links to other pages or to parts within the page: a section with navigation links.” If it’s just a list of links, why isn’t it grouped with lists like UL and OL? Nesting a UL or OL in the NAV element seems redundant.
The document is still under discussion so anything can change. Browser support is probably a few years away anyways.
1. I imagine this would never work, as we’re all greedy.
as conceptually cool as some of these tags sound, it’s really pretty useless to actually define them. it just puts more jumble into the tagspace.
maybe i’m a bit short-sighted, but why can’t DIV use a ‘type’ attribute?
div type=”header”
div type=”footer”
etc.
and then for TABLE
table type=”datagrid”
that attribute is unused in block-level elements as far as i know, so might as well keep things simple and (here’s the kicker) extensible for future use. or maybe it is more useful to have a header and datagrid tag? i guess it wouldn’t seem like much of an ‘upgrade’ if they didn’t throw in new tags =/
XHTML 2.0 is much much cooler as far as actual advancements go.
Ah! I was thinking from a CSS view, which would benefit from having tags instead of types for current elements.
What would be really cool is if you can customise your own tags
hot hot hot!