A Preview of HTML 5

December 7th, 2007  |  Published in Blog, Web Design

A List Apart’s article “A Preview of HTML 5” gives an overview of the current status of HTML5. One of the cool things about HTML5 is that it would introduce new elements that would provide semantic alternatives to using the div element for page layout.

HTML 5 introduces a whole set of new elements that make it much easier to structure pages. Most HTML 4 pages include a variety of common structures, such as headers, footers and columns and today, it is fairly common to mark them up using div elements, giving each a descriptive id or class.

The use of div elements is largely because current versions of HTML 4 lack the necessary semantics for describing these parts more specifically. HTML 5 addresses this issue by introducing new elements for representing each of these different sections.