Continuing our examination of HTML5, this time we’ll take a slightly deeper look at the state of HTML5 support in browsers. We’ll step through several major features, examine the technical hurdles in place, identify the level of browser support and finally provide some recommendations on whether or not to pull the trigger with that shiny new feature.
New Semantic Elements
HTML5 has added many new semantic elements. These both codify existing, common patterns and offer new, meaningful ways mark up your content. So, for example, going forward, instead of using <div id="header"> we will now just use <header>. Some other examples (with definitions culled from the specification) include:
- section
- The section element represents a generic document or application section. A section, in this context, is a thematic grouping of content, typically with a heading.
Examples of sections would be chapters, the various tabbed pages in a tabbed dialog box, or the numbered sections of a thesis. A Web site’s home page could be split into sections for an introduction, news items, contact information.
- footer
- The footer element represents a footer for its nearest ancestor sectioning content or sectioning root element. A footer typically contains information about its section such as who wrote it, links to related documents, copyright data, and the like.
- nav
- 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.
- article
- The article element represents a component of a page that consists of a self-contained composition in a document, page, application, or site and that is intended to be independently distributable or reusable, e.g. in syndication. This could be a forum post, a magazine or newspaper article, a blog entry, a user-submitted comment, an interactive widget or gadget, or any other independent item of content.
That’s far from a complete list, but it should serve to give you the flavor of what’s available.
Support
This is a curious case. If, by “support” we mean “doesn’t break anything” then the support here is broad. Using the HTML5 Shiv code snippet or the full blown Modernizr library every browser that matters supports the HTML5 elements. If you’re expecting user agents to do something interesting with your new elements, then the support level is much lower.
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