[html5] What is the point about nav, header, footer and aside elements?

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Wed Nov 28 09:14:20 PST 2012


On 28 November 2012 15:22, Prof. T.D. Wilson <wilsontd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Just a small point - these aren't "semantic", they are simply (as you 
> note) layout tags - they say nothing about the meaning of what is 
> between the tags and there is no connection between tag and content 
> other than to indicate where the content is to be found - at the head of 
> a page, or the foot of the page, etc. A "semantic" tag would have to say 
> what the content is about, and I can't imagine any such tags being 
> developed any time soon :-)

They're as semantic as the most semantic HTML elements. The HTML spec 
details their meaning:

   http://whatwg.org/html#sections

Certainly though, the semantics of HTML elements are only relatively 
vague, and don't rise to the level of understanding the specific meaning 
of the text of a page. That meaning is present in the text itself, so 
there's not much point marking it up. :-)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'



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