HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
their web pages. While HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 are still great choices for
the markup of your pages, it's a good idea to start learning what HTML5 has
to o
"
er so you can work with it comfortably in the future and perhaps start
taking advantage of some of its features now. So, here is a brief overview of
how HTML5 can help with our five modern CSS-based web design
characteristics (progressive enrichment, adaptive to diverse users, modular,
e
!
cient, typographically rich).
Note: Many of these techniques are not supported in enough browsers yet
to make their benefits really tangible, so think of this section as, perhaps,
“here's how HTML5
can
aid these five characteristics in the
future
.”
NEW STRUCTURAL MARKUP
Aids: adaptability, modularity, e
"
ciency
HTML5 introduces a number of new semantic elements that can add more
structure to your markup to increase modularity. For instance, inside your
main content
div
you can have several
article
elements, each a
standalone chunk of content, and each can have its own
header
,
footer,
and heading hierarchy (
h1
through
h6
). You can further divide up an
article
element with
section
elements, again with their own
header
s
and
footer
s. Having clearer, more semantic markup makes it easier to
shu
#
e independent chunks of content around your site if needed, or
syndicate them through RSS on other sites and blogs.
In the future, as user agents build features to take advantage of HTML5,
these new elements could also make pages more adaptable to di
"
erent
user scenarios. For instance, web pages or browsers could generate table of
contents based on the richer hierarchy provided by HTML5, to assist
navigation within a page or across a site. Assistive technology like screen
