• From: Salisbury UK
  • Registered: December 20, 2008
  • Posts: 1,331

Topic: New elements and attributes in HTML 5

I've been looking at the new element tags in these webpages:-
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#new-elements
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html

section, article, aside, header, footer, nav, dialog, figure, audio, video, embed (new use), mark, meter, time, canvas, command, datagrid, details, datalist, datatemplate, rule, nest, event-source, output, progress, ruby, type

and new attributes:-

media, ping, value, charset, autofocus, and others

Will these be any use to someone designing a site for the general public who will have old browsers? I can only see them being of use in a company intranet where all computers have new browsers or where the website users are all high-tech IT people, like university computer departments. If we use them in websites for the general public, will the pages display in any reasonable way? If I use <video> instead of <object> will an old computer browser leave a space or just ignore it?

I also notice that the existing list of tags includes q, cite and address, does anybody use them? Do they work in IE6? Or is it just that you have to add a style to each like h tags and otherwise they are normal text, except that screen readers read out the tag name?

I realise that HTML 5 is not yet available, but I'd like to know whether any of it will actually be useable.

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  • Gender: Male
  • From: Chico/Sacramento, CA
  • Registered: December 19, 2008
  • Posts: 2,810
  • Reputation: 14

Re: New elements and attributes in HTML 5

On the positive side, it looks like HTML 5 will allow for better semantic markup, and will mean we can use <header> instead of <div id="header"> making our code slightly easier to read and mark up using CSS.

As you say though, when will this actually be usable? Hard to say... I suppose when 90% of browsers support it. I'm not too worried about Firefox/Safari/Chrome/Opera, since they tend to lead with new features, but IE may (as usual) slow things down.

Benjamin Falk | Falken Creative : Twitter
Skills: Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML, CSS, jQuery, PHP and CodeIgniter

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  • From: Harrison, AR
  • Registered: December 21, 2008
  • Posts: 510

Re: New elements and attributes in HTML 5

I'm more in agreement with the ALA article currently on their front page.  The new tags, while useful, are only a single subset of what HTML could be used for.

What we really need is extensibility - the ability to add our own tags, attributes, or "hooks", to more clearly define structure.

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  • From: Harrison, AR
  • Registered: December 21, 2008
  • Posts: 510

Re: New elements and attributes in HTML 5

Also, <ruby>?  seriously?

Why not <python> or <lisp> or <haskell>?  I'm having a hard time taking this working group seriously, with recommendations like this.

Last edited by lwsimon (January 9, 2009 5:11 pm)

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  • From: Salisbury UK
  • Registered: December 20, 2008
  • Posts: 1,331

Re: New elements and attributes in HTML 5

The q, cite and address elements are not new, they appear on the w3schools list of elements
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/default.asp
so I thought I would do a quick check.
<style type="text/css">
q { color: red; }
address { color: green; }
cite { color: blue; }
</style>

<address>
Tom Smith<br>
26 This Road<br>
Newtown
</address>
<cite>This is a citation</cite>
<q>This is a quotation</q>

In IE6 and IE7 the q text was just plain black text, but in Firefox, Opera, Safari and IE8 it was black in "...." when I expected red text.

In IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera and Safari browsers the address and cite elements produced italic text with the styled colors.

Although these are supposed to be available now I've never seen a webpage on this forum or anywhere else that uses them.

Last edited by Wickham (January 10, 2009 8:29 am)

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