I’ve been working to sharpen and add to my skill set and am participating in Aquent’s Summer of Learning, which focuses on HTML5.
The book used for self-study is HTML5 & CSS3 Visual QuickStartGuide by Elizabeth Castro and Bruce Hyslop. It really has me thinking about semantic markup, that is, using HTML elements, attributes, and values and ARIA roles to describe the meaning of the content. HTML5 introduces new container elements like header
, footer
, nav
, article
, and section
that give information about the content based on the element name. ARIA roles (e.g., navigation
, main
, complementary
) provide similar information targeted to assistive technologies like screen readers. Microformats such as hCalendar tell user agents that the strings within the HTML tags represent specific information such as a calendar event.
Of course, site users don’t typically view a page’s source to see the markup. Not one in a thousand will know if you followed best practices and used the element i
to place italics around a book title, the element em
to indicate that a word or phrase is being emphasized, and the address
element for the author’s contact information — all these will appear as italics unless you tweak the CSS to give them a different appearance. Users won’t know if you wrap the publication date in the new time
element using the pubdate
and datetime
attributes. (Browsers are supposed to display text based on datetime
‘s value but support for this is lacking.)
So, what’s the payoff?