How to Confuse a Developer 101

As you may know, I am building an HTML5/Wordpress theme using the HTML5 Boilerplate. I have no problems with it at all. What I do have problems with, is trying to figure out what tag to use, and where to use it. I’ve talked about this before, with the ‘nav’ and ‘address’ tags. That was before I actually tried to build anything using the new HTML5 tags. Now that I am trying to use them, I find myself questioning if I am using the right tag!

HTML4 (whatever . version we are on) is not complicated. Wrap text blocks in ‘p’ tags. Links get wrapped in ‘a’ tags, and so on. All of which is easy to understand. There are no ‘ifs’ or ‘sometimes’ involved. After reading through some of the definitions for these new tags, I get the feeling that the interpretation of when to use them can be subjective.

You want to know how to confuse the hell out of all of us? Easy as pie. CHANGE THE TAG DEFINITIONS AS WE GO!

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For the people who read the title and are going to moan about how awesome the video/audio tags are and what not, go read the ENTIRE article of the elements of HTML5…here is the link.

Then come back and lets talk…mmmmmkay?

Is it still awesome? I’m going to give you a ‘for instance’ here. Let’s start with…the address tag. When you hear “address” tag, what do you think of? What would you put in this tag? Before you read that article, you probably thought “Well, the freakin’ address you idiot!” Guess what though? You would be wrong. Quoted from the article:

“The address element must not be used to represent arbitrary addresses (e.g. postal addresses), unless those addresses are in fact the relevant contact information. (The p element is the appropriate element for marking up postal addresses in general.)”

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