Using the right HTML elements has more importance than many of us realise.
Known as Semantic HTML, it's all about bringing meaning to the page and not just presentation. A <p> element contains a paragraph, and everyone knows what that should look like. Not only does it help communicate what the page contains to search engines, it also helps screen readers do their job as efficiently as possible.
This article will list some lesser known tags for you to have as many tools as possible on a daily basis.
<abbr>: Abbreviations
Should contain abbreviations like the ones in the example below. You could use this to define an abbreviation that is unfamiliar to the reader using the title attribute or inline text providing a definition.
<dfn>: Definitions
You should use this element on the element being described in the context of the sentence. The ancestor <p>, <dt>/<dd>or <section> are considered to be the definition of that word.
<address>: Contact information
You can use it to provide contact information.
As shared by Lars De Richter in the comments, we should keep in mind that not all types of addresses should be displayed using this element:
Information provided by address may include the names of the document’s maintainers, links to the maintainers’ Web pages, e-mail addresses for feedback, postal addresses, phone numbers, and so on. The address element is not appropriate for all postal and e-mail addresses; it should be reserved for providing such information about the contact people for the document.
<cite>: Citations
Should be used when referencing cited creative work.
<del>: Deleted text
This tag can surround text that has been deleted from a document.
It's definitely worth noting the accessibility concerns this tag presents.
<hgroup>: Multi-level heading
This tag can regroup multiple headings in a document (<h1>-<h6>). This way, none of the secondary children in this group will create separate sections of their own.
It's worth noting that "the element has been removed from the HTML5 (W3C) specification, but it still is in the WHATWG version of HTML. It is partially implemented in most browsers, though, so is unlikely to go away." so use it with caution 😄 More information
<ins>: Inserted text
Represents a range of text that has been added to a document, pretty similar to what Github displays to show a line of code that has been replaced.
Wrapping up
There are so many HTML tags that are unknown to the vast majority of web developers. Putting content and meaning at the same level will help us build better and more inclusive web pages. All it takes is practice 😄
I hope you find some use-cases for these tags, as specific as some of them can be.
Either way, thank you so much for reading, if you enjoyed this article and learned a couple of things, following me on Twitter @christo_kade would be the best way to get informed on my latest articles & weird side-projects.
Top comments (28)
Over all pretty good, but you should probably avoid advising folks use the hgroup element. It looks like you've grabbed these code examples from MDN, so you should probably have spotted the usage notes on hgroup, which notes that it's been removed from the HTML spec.
For further reading on heading markup, you can check out this
Absolutely, thank you for pointing it out. I should have mentioned it as I have for other elements.
What about
<marquee>though? 😅😅marquee is deprecated
does it have a replacement?
github.com/muchweb/html5-marquee
mark
highlight text
/mark
dev.to/samanthaming/highlight-text...
Nice collection, but there is a problem with your explanation of the address-element, although it is a very common misconception (I have used it loads of times in this way). The HTML5 Doctor explains it very clearly: html5doctor.com/the-address-element/
Thank you so much for pointing it out, that's valuable information, i'll add it to the article as soon as I can 😄
Great article. I had no idea about any of these, I can definitely see myself using the hgroup tag in the future.
In replacement of <hgroup>, MDN has some other suggestions:
w3.org/TR/html52/common-idioms-wit...
Glad you found some use out of it. I thought the exact same thing when I discovered
hgroup😄Thanks so much
Neat, thanks for sharing!
thanks, for this handy article
Thank you very much for sharing that information. Some of the mentioned, i haven't known so far.
Glad you've learned something out of it ! Thank you for reading 🙂
Thanks for the great article and some of them look really interesting to use,
My question is are those really help in SEO when using them ?
I love Semantic HTML. Good article!
Thanks, especially grouping the headers is something worth knowing.
Except it’s not :-)
Ah, I had forgotten about these tags
You're better off using RDFa or Microdata for semantic markup. Search engines understand it (at least partially), and the vocabulary is much more general.
Thank you. I liked it