Friday, March 20th, 2009
HTML 5 section is not just a “semantic div”
Category: Standards
div class="section" for example:
HTML 5 introduces new elements like <section>, <article> and <footer> for structuring the content in your webpages. They can be employed in many situations where <div> is used today and should help you make more readable, maintainable, HTML source. But if you just go through your document and blindly replace all the <div>s with <section>s you are doing it wrong.
This is not just semantic nit-picking, there is a practical reason to use these elements correctly.
In HTML 5, there is an algorithm for constructing an outline view of documents. This can be used, for example by AT, to help a user navigate through a document. And <section> and friends are an important part of this algorithm. Each time you nest a <section>, you increase the outline depth by 1 (in case you are wondering what the advantages of this model are compared to the traditional <h1>-<h6> model, consider a web based feedreader that wants to integrate the document structure of the syndicated content with that of the surrounding site. In HTML 4 this means parsing all the content and renumbering all the headings. In HTML5 the headings end up at the right depth for free).
You can also talk about other items such as the new menu tag that the browser can render with an interesting native menu item.
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4.3 rating from 16 votes
Interesting to notice that the HTML 4 deprecated
menutag is now part of the HTML 5 draft/standard. That means we can already use it, hooray!“The menu element is redefined in HTML 5, and should now be used to list form controls.”
Is that a joke ?
They should really work on file upload for html 5. It says something that sites have to hack around the input type = file to do anything remotely custom to their app.
@ilazarte, where “it says”?
@igstan “It says something that XXXX” is an English idiom meaning that XXXX is negative / unwanted :)
@jeromew, thanks for clarification. If it had some intonation I would have understood it from the first time.
@jeromew, that’s not exactly what the idiom means. It just means that it’s noteworthy. “It says something that HTML 5 is so much more capable by adopting and formalizing existing practices” is just as correct a use of the turn of phrase. /pedant
If only w3c was as quick to complete specification, as we all are to get off-track :D
We need a flag set on a web page to indicate if the markup is intended to be semantic or not… for example a heavy “one page” web application can never really be semantic in my opinion.
I think there should be more allowance for and demarcation between these two uses of the web… standard blog type semantic HTML and HTML to design complicated application UI’s