How come [some] these 5 HTML elements are not more widely known?
This is a list of HTML elements I’ve found to be very poorly represented in most markup on the web today. Many of these elements offer more semantic value than actual functionality, but with the rising popularity of CSS driven design where HTML elements are used for what they were actually intended for, I felt shining a little light on them was appropriate.
[W]here HTML elements are used for what they were actually intended for. Ouch. You got me. I’ve been guilty of using a definition list here or there for *cough* non-definition list elements.
Anyhow, check out the <address> tag which can be styled with a wee bit ‘o CSS.
<address>
5thirtyone.com
<br />
1234 Pine St.
<br />
Seattle, WA
<br />
Phone: (123) 456-7890
</address>
Check out the remaining elements. Don’t be coy, admit anything that is altogether new to you.
Most of the W3C’s examples for ADDRESS are actually used for displaying email addresses rather than snail-mail ones, and I think the original spec says something about the contact details of the ‘author of the document’, so you can’t use it to mark up a list of outlet addresses on a company website, for example (although microformats are excellently suited to that job!)
I regularly use all the others, though. Well, except ABBR due to lack of IE support.
I wish we could come up with HTML solutions like these (address, etc.) instead of having to resort to microformats. If only the standards were more responsive to how times change.
I must admit to not knowing about <address>, but I’m not sure how useful it is since there’s nothing explaining what part of the address each line describes. Is it email address, name, street, city, country? Or something else all together.
I knew about <q> but I thought that <blockquote> was for paragraphs of quote and then with <q>’s nested within it for sub-quotes. Didn’t know about the quotes css bit though, I’ll have to play with that for when I have french quotes in some docs.
The rest seem pretty common, most people just don’t use <abbr> because IE doesn’t recognise it.
[quote comment="5622"]The rest seem pretty common, most people just don’t use <abbr> because IE doesn’t recognise it.[/quote]
IE7 apparently supports the <abbr> tag. I’ll probably start using the tag again because of that.
I was aware of the tags mentioned, but a cursory glance a couple of years ago at IE’s compatibility ensured they were to stay in the cupboard.
Derek, thanks for the heads up on IE7’s support of – time to bring it back into use, I feel.