Robert Hampton

Another visitor! Stay a while… stay forever!

15th August 2007

Don’t be a <div>

Technical webby stuff alert! The HTML5 draft specification is up on the W3C web site, and looks interesting.

The really good stuff from my point of view is the introduction of loads of new tags to mark up sections, so I could, for example, wrap my navigation bar within a <nav> tag instead of something like <div class="navigation">. Other similar tags include <section>, <article>, <aside>, <header> and <footer>.

It’s all very much in keeping with the original spirit of HTML, which always intended that text should be marked up for meaning rather than appearance. It will also be helpful to anyone who codes their web pages by hand, as well-crafted HTML5 code should be easier to understand than HTML4. This will hopefully mean fewer long evenings for me trying to untangle a sea of nested <div> tags.

The important question is: how good will the support be in the various browsers for this new standard?

One Response
  1. Comment by chez
    15th August 2007 at 4:39 pm

    hiya hampo! it’s me, alexander szczesniak. Wasn’t me on the train btw lol. e-mail me back for a catch up 🙂
    Regards 🙂