Check out the article over at IBM on New Elements in HTML 5.

Everyone who knows me knows that I loathe using tables for layout.  My biggest beef with it (there are many) are that it usually renders an unnecessary amount of markup for simple things.  Good CSS design reduces this drastically but there are occasions when you have a layout that ends up being as bloated as using tables.

If you need to style two sections of divs that have a similar or convoluted hierarchy, you usually have to resort to adding classes.  Classes add to the visual weight of the HTML, so I generally prefer not to use them if I can select the element using CSS.

New tags in HTML 5 will help with this even further.  These are all semantic structural tags that encourage proper design using HTML:

• section
• header
• footer
• nav
• article

A <`section> `element will denote regions of the page that can easily be selected. Who knows, <`section> `might even replace <`div>`.

You’ll also notice a trend where tags have no visual representation at all.  They might be styled differently by CSS, but that’s not the point.  a <time> element could be used for programs to easily distinguish the time of a post, or the time that the page was last rendered, for example.

Check out the article, it is worth a read.  These changes are long overdue and will help raise the bar on web standards usage even further.  Let’s just hope IE plays nice this time (I think they will).