HTML5 Tags

List of New HTML5 Tags

One great thing about HTML compared to “programming languages” is that it is finite. There is probably someone out there who, just for the fun of it, memorized all the HTML tags and can rattle them off in alphabetical order or according to the number of letters in the tag. HTML5 adds some great features to HTML and standardizes some others that were de facto standardized already. There is a lot of new stuff to learn. But, luckily for our friend who memorized all the tags, HTML5 doesn’t pose such a threat. There are only 28 new tags, which are listed and briefly described below:

#	Tag	Description
1	<article>	For a standalone article on a page. Articles can be nested within other articles; for example, a blog post would be contained in <article> tags and each comment would be contained within a nested <article> tag.
2	<aside>	For content contained in an aside. Often used for navigation elements or for a list of articles or categories (e.g., in a blog).
3	<audio>	For embedding audio files.
4	<canvas>	For creating graphics and graphic applications. (see this cool example of pong created with <canvas>)
5	<command>	For command buttons similar to what you might see in the Microsoft Office 2010 ribbon. <command> must be nested in <menu>.
6	<datalist>	For a dropdown list providing built-in functionality similar to a JavaScript autocomplete boxes.
7	<details>	For expandable (usually initially hidden) content to provide more information about an element.
8	<embed>	For backwards compatibility with the non-standard (but well supported) <embed> tag in HTML 4.
9	<figcaption>	For captions on images. (In HTML4, there was no way to semantically associate a caption with an image.
10	<figure>	For wrapping embedded content (e.g, an image) with a <figcaption>.
11	<footer>	For the footer of a page or a section.
12	<header>	For the header of a page or a section.
13	<hgroup>	For grouping <h1>…<h6> tags on a page. For example, the title and subtitle of a page could be an <h1> and <h2> grouped in an <hgroup> tag.
14	<keygen>	For a generated key in a form
15	<mark>	For showing marked (or highlighted) text. Unlike <strong> or <em>, <mark> doesn’t give the text any special meaning. The best example is marking a word or phrase that a user has searched on within the search results.
16	<meter>	For a measurement within a set range.
17	<nav>	For holding a group of navigation links.
18	<output>	For holding output (e.g., produced by a script).
19	<progress>	For a progress indicator (e.g., for a loading).
20	<rp>	Used within <ruby> tags to tell browsers that cannot render the East Asia characters properly what extra characters (usually parentheses) to display.
21	<rt>	Used within <ruby> tags to show how to pronounce East Asia characters.
22	<ruby>	For ruby annotations. (See specification for examples.)
23	<section>	For creating a <section> on the page. This helps the browser (user agent) determine the page outline.
24	<source>	For indicating media sources within <video> and <audio>.
25	<summary>	For the header of a <detail> element. The <summary> would show by default.
26	<time>	For holding a machine-readable date and/or time while displaying a friendly date and/or time.
27	<video>	For embedding video files.
28	<wbr>	An opportunity to insert a line break within a word. (e.g, super<wbr>califragilistic<wbr>expialidocious)