What a brilliant idea! For the longest time HTML5 specified, and advised developers, that it no longer mattered what the number (1 to 6) was in a heading element (when used in conjunction with sectioning elements). What mattered was the nesting level of the H1-h6 in sectioning elements, just like the X<H>TML promised land, but […]

One of the many new input types that HTML5 introduced is the date input type which, in theory, should allow a developer to provide the user with a simple, usable, recognisable method of entering a date on a web page. But sadly, this input type has yet to reach its full potential. Briefly, the date […]

ARIA is an amazing technology, it allows developers to add meaning to meaningless HTML or override meaning on HTML that is being repurposed and sometimes misused, so that users who rely upon the meaning of HTML, as implemented in browsers, can understand and interact with HTML User Interfaces successfully.

Updated: 3rd August 2020 The question of whether HTML elements need the addition of ARIA role attributes to expose their semantics, is one that surfaces on a regular basis. The answer is maybe for a subset of elements, but increasingly no.

Forwards In recent weeks I contacted around 40 people, a cross section of those who have banged away at, or banged on about, HTML5. I asked them for their perspectives on HTML5 becoming a W3C Recommendation. Below are the words of the 28 people who responded, pretty much in the order they hit my inbox: […]

By Marcos Cáceres and Bruce Lawson. Update 26 September 2014 The initial work for Manifest in Chromium M39 is done, and Marcos (more or less) finished coding the processor a few months ago. “I’m hoping to see it in fxos 2.2“, he said from the pool of his gorgeous Malibu home.) Update 11 November 2014 […]

ARIA (WAI-ARIA if you want to be formal) is a set of attributes that you can add to HTML elements. These attributes communicate role, state and property semantics to assistive technologies via the accessibility APIs implemented in browsers. The W3C HTML specification provides information about which ARIA attributes are allowed to be used on each […]

It’s nearly two years since I suggested a <picture> element as a strawman proposal as a way to solve the problem of responsive images, so let’s have a look at how we’re doing.

The definitions of the blockquote and cite elements in the HTML specification have recently been updated. This article explains what the changes mean for developers.

Since the mists of HTML 2 we’ve been able to semantically indicate added or removed information using the elements <ins> and <del> respectively. While seemingly simple on the surface these elements have hidden depths. I’ll also compare and contrast <del> with <s>, recently out of font style rehab and back in HTML5. Let’s start with <ins> and <del>…