New elements and attributes in HTML 5

[Wickham]

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

 

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.

[falkencreative]

On the positive side, it looks like HTML 5 will allow for better semantic markup, and will mean we can use

instead of

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.

[lwsimon]

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.

[lwsimon]

Also, ? seriously?

 

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

Edited January 9, 2009 by lwsimon

[Wickham]

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.

q { color: red; }

address { color: green; }

cite { color: blue; }

 

Tom Smith

 

26 This Road

 

Newtown

This is a citation

This is a quotation

 

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.

Edited January 10, 2009 by Wickham