| HTML5 Quick Learning Guide | |
| Just what you need to know to quickly | |
| move from HTML / XHTML to HTML5 | |
| Brought to you by | |
| http://freehtml5templates.com/ | |
| Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License | |
| HTML5 syntax is compatible with both HTML4 and XHTML1. Want to close | |
| empty elements with a slash? Go for it. Rather not? Then don't. Want to use | |
| lower case? Upper case? Take your pick. In other words, you really don't have | |
| to change the way you handle these things, so don't worry, ok? | |
| HTML5 doctype is much simpler: | |
| New way: | |
| <!doctype html> | |
| Old ways: | |
| <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" | |
| "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> | |
| or | |
| <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" | |
| "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> | |
| Meta charset tag is much simpler: | |
| New way: | |
| <meta charset="UTF-8"> | |
| Old way: | |
| <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF- | |
| 8" /> | |
| Divs are now used for styling rather than structure; HTML5 includes several | |
| new structural elements that help define parts of the document. Let's take a | |
| look at the main new structural elements that you'll probably use right away. | |
| (Note that included in the head is an HTML5 shiv that allows us to style elements in IE, | |
| and a basic CSS style is also included so we can help browsers that aren't caught up yet to | |
| render the new block-level elements as block-level elements. For now, it's easiest just to | |
| automatically include them. Understanding why can come later.) | |
| Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License | |
| Main Structural Elements You'll Use Most Often in HTML5 | |
| <header> | |
| <nav> | |
| <section> | |
| <article> | |
| <aside> | |
| <footer> | |
| Although these sound like “positions” in a document, and very often will be | |
| used in that way, they really are about grouping and not positioning. You might | |
| have 3 <sections> in a page, with each <section> having its own <header> and | |
| <footer> for instance. (Note that these elements – like classes – can be used | |
| more than once on a page). | |
| But to keep things simple, for this document's purpose, let's just think of a | |
| very basic document that contains a top header, a menu for navigation, a | |
| content section that contains a couple of articles, a sidebar, and a footer. | |
| In HTML4 or XHTML, you probably would have used divs, classes and ids to | |
| group each of those areas. You can and should still use divs, classes and ids for | |
| styling reasons, but they may no longer be as necessary as before for | |
| structural purposes. Some documents may be able to get by without them | |
| completely, while most will probably still need them for styling. But again, for | |
| the purposes of learning the quick facts to create a simple HTML5 document, | |
| let's keep this really basic. | |
| Here's a simple way to code a very basic document that contains a top header, | |
| a menu for navigation, a content section that contains a couple of articles, a | |
| sidebar, and a footer in HTML5. | |
| Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License | |
| <!doctype html> | |
| <html> | |
| <head> | |
| <meta charset="utf-8"> | |
| <title>Very Basic Document</title> | |
| <!--[if IE]><script src="http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script><![endif]--> | |
| <style>header, footer, section, aside, nav, article {display: block;}</style> | |
| </head> | |
| <body> | |
| <nav> | |
| <ul> | |
| </ul> | |
| </nav> | |
| <header> | |
| <li><a href="#">Home</a></li> | |
| <li><a href="#">About</a></li> | |
| <li><a href="#">Products</a></li> | |
| <li><a href="#">Contact Us</a></li> | |
| <h1><a href="#">Very Basic Document</a></h1> | |
| <h2>A tag line might go here</h2> | |
| </header> | |
| <section> | |
| <article> | |
| <h3><a href="#">First Article Title</a></h3> | |
| <img src="images/flower.jpg" alt="flower"> | |
| <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer nec odio. </p> | |
| </article> | |
| <article> | |
| <h3><a href="#">Second Article Title</a></h3> | |
| <img src="images/tree.jpg" alt="tree"> | |
| <p>Praesent libero. Sed cursus ante dapibus diam.</p> | |
| </article> | |
| </section> | |
| <aside> | |
| <h4>Connect With Us</h4> | |
| <ul> | |
| </ul> | |
| <li><a href="#">Twitter</a></li> | |
| <li><a href="#">Facebook</a></li> | |
| </aside> | |
| <footer> | |
| <p>All rights reserved.</p> | |
| </footer> | |
| </body> | |
| </html> | |
| Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License | |
| As you can see, the structure is fairly simple, and you can style these new | |
| structural elements in the CSS. However, because you may have some of these | |
| structural elements within different groupings on a page (such as several | |
| sections having different headers and footers), you may want to style each | |
| differently. In that case, you can still assign ids and classes just as you would | |
| in HTML4 or XHTML. | |
| The point of the structural elements is to designate structure after all; | |
| presentation is dealt with in the CSS in whatever manner works best for you, | |
| using ids and classes. | |
| So what are the actual definitions of these new structural elements? | |
| <header> represents a group of introductory or navigational aids. (Things | |
| you'd usually wrap in a H1, H2, Hx, etc) | |
| <nav> represents a section of the document intended for navigation. (Like a | |
| menu) | |
| <section> represents a generic document or application section. It can be | |
| used together with the h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6 elements to indicate the | |
| document structure. (Just a logical grouping such as a content section) | |
| <article> represents an independent piece of content of a document, such as | |
| a blog entry or newspaper article. (Independent is the key word here. If the | |
| piece of content could make sense plucked out of this document and placed | |
| somewhere else, it's probably an article) | |
| <aside> represents a piece of content that is only slightly related to the rest | |
| of the page. (Usually a sidebar, but could be another type of content that | |
| isn't directly related to the main content) | |
| <footer> represents a footer for a section and can contain information about | |
| the author, copyright information, et cetera. (You know, like... a footer) | |
| Of course, HTML5 comes with other interesting elements such as the video and | |
| audio elements, plus new and changed elements and attributes, but all of | |
| those belong in a separate cheat sheet. This one is to get you up and running | |
| fast, so there you have it. Just the basics that will let you quickly move from | |
| HTML4 or XHTML to HTML5 right now! | |
| Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License | |
| If you want to delve into the finer points, I recommend starting with the W3C | |
| draft, entitled HTML5 differences from HTML4 located at | |
| http://dev.w3.org/html5/html4-differences/ | |
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| Pretty simple, yes? :) | |
| Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License | |