
The three levels of HTML5 usage - shawndumas
http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/html5-levels
======
jahewson
Strictly speaking, it's a _slash_ not a _solidus_.

Unicode actually gets it wrong, the character / SOLIDUS is not a solidus at
all, it is a (forward) slash. A solidus has a much more shallow angle and was
used as a separator in old British currency, and is still used in Mathematics.
Ironically the Unicode character for an actual solidus is ⁄ FRACTION SLASH.

Further reading:
[http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Solidus...](http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Solidus_\(punctuation\).html)

~~~
mnarayan01
That makes his use of the term "solidus" a bit baffling (maybe it's referred
to as such somewhere in the HTML5 specs?). I actually assumed he must mean
both the characters in "/>" -- glad you mentioned it before I made a fool of
myself somewhere.

~~~
jahewson
Yes, it's in the HTML spec as "solidus" because Unicode 0x47 is "SOLIDUS".
That's the right thing to do in an important spec. It's just confusing in a
blog post though, as most people have not heard of a solidus, and now they've
learnt it wrong!

~~~
mathias
I’ve always used the term “solidus” whenever I refer to the slash in `/>` in
self-closing elements in XML/XHTML.

In any other situation I’d call it a slash.

------
samwillis
I am sure I was using anchor tags with 'display: block' long before HTML5. Did
browsers support this despite it not being in HTML4?

~~~
jonespen
I believe his point is that in HTML5 block elements inside the a element is
valid.

------
protonfish
This CSS:

    
    
        article, aside, footer, header, section {
            display: block;
        }
    

Does not make the new sectioning elements work in IE8. It sucks but since IE8
is the highest version of IE available for Windows XP and Win7 machines still
ship with IE8 installed as default, supporting this browser will continue to
be critical for all consumer sites for the next several years, minimum.
Besides, using:

    
    
        <div class="header">
    

Is not that bad.

~~~
pornel
They do work* in IE6/7/8 with one more hack (linked later in the article):

<http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-shiv/>

*) for DOM/styling purposes. The fancy new outline algorithm isn't implemented anywhere yet :(

------
joey_muller
Very helpful indeed. Thanks

