Are you using HTML 5 Elements?

[Zoom]

I am talking about section, article, nav etc.

I’ve read arguments against using these elements and I am not convinced yet about the degree that they should be used.

[chrisburton]

What arguments have you read against these elements? Can you post links?

[__]

tl;dr: yes.

Since browser implementation will vary, you need to define default styling for them (e.g., normalize.css).

Use conditional comments to serve the html5shiv to IE.

No problems.

[Zoom]

I can’t post links to the arguments as they are in a book:
http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Web-Multi-Device-Development-JavaScript-ebook/dp/B00CFS5V3Q

To summarize his argument:
– The spec is not clear about when to use article/section
– No support for older IE versions without javascript
– No currently available browsers support the new outlining algorithm

So the way I understand it is that you reduce accessibility (old IE without JS), you increase the weight of your pages (adding the html5shiv etc mentioned earlier) without actually gaining anything.

He suggests using WAI-ARIA, microdata, microformats etc instead.

And then today I was reading reviews for another (more recent) book http://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-HTML5-Luke-Stevens/dp/1430264152/ and in one of the reviews is written “The author states several reasons why one shouldn’t use html 5 elements”.

The impression that I got is that these new elements fail to accomplish their mission (making HTML more semantic) and that there are better ways to accomplish this.

[Alen]

Some interesting points (50min):

http://vimeo.com/79556632

[nixnerd]

I use them where it makes absolute sense. Section, article and aside I like.

Sections should have headings, or they’re probably not sections. Asides I use for content that isn’t totally necessary for the overall page to make sense.

I think this adheres to spec.

+1 for more readable code.

Also, with Sass and nesting, I don’t even give these things classes unless I have to. That makes the HTML super clean.

[__]

…I don’t even give these things classes unless I have to. That makes the HTML super clean.

Whaaaaaa, semantics actually useful? +1.

[Author]

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