

5 html elements you probably never use but should - araneae
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/5-html-elements-you-probably-never-use-but-perhaps-should

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garply
Summary:

<address>, <q>, <optgroup>, <acronym> or <abbr>, <fieldset> and <legend>

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fboliv
This article is quite old. You'll find more recent use cases/examples on the
current HTML5 editor's draft (<http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html>).
In its temporal context the author was right (fieldset/legend/abbr weren't
that used) but fortunately times have changed a bit and things aren't as bad
as he describes.

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mahmud
I must be one of the luck SOBs who learned proper HTML and web development
first, having picked up this whole web fad just in the last year (took a long
hiatus, my last web app before that was written in 2003.) I have html-
generating macros and I use legend, label and abbr within fieldsets throughout
my code base (though I usually forget they even exist until I see the
generated code.)

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eli
Hate to be a jerk, but I really don't see what <address> adds over <div
class="address">

It is was an actual microformat for addresses, that makes sense, but it's not.
It's just a tag that implies that some kind of address (virtual, physical, who
knows) is contained within. Who does this actually benefit?

~~~
Hexstream
<address> doesn't mean what you think it means:

<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#edef-ADDRESS>

"The ADDRESS element may be used by authors to supply contact information for
a document or a major part of a document such as a form. This element often
appears at the beginning or end of a document."

~~~
eli
Fair enough, but what does that add?

We should use the tag so that some yet-to-be-invented web spider might be able
to automatically extract contact info for the pages it crawls?

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gaius
<address> is what people should have been using all along - I remember it was
common in academic websites in the early-mid 90s, but it fell out of fashion.
Similarly <em> for emphasis, the semantic meaning was lost when people
switched to <b> and <i> instead.

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sdfx
Good comments were made on a similar list of underused html elements that was
submitted some time ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481067>

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ramidarigaz
<q> doesn't seem to work in Firefox 3.0

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derefr
The page just doesn't have the actual styles applied to it. I can verify it
works in FF3 when you style it properly; I use it myself all the time.

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crcoffey
none of it seems to work very well at all in Chrome, or my Firefox 3.0

Seems to be a very redundant article.

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zackattack
The only tag I thought was actually useful is <optgroup>, when you have
Categories (labels) in your drop-down <select> that you don't want to be
selectable.

