New Elements in HTML 5


HTML 5 has been in development for a good few years now. In addition to clarifying a lot of grey areas in previous versions of the spec, and changing a few definitions to reflect real-world use, it also introduces a few new elements. Here's a quick look at some of the more interesting ones.

The í element

HTML 5 redefines the i element, which was purely presentational and denoted anything that looked vaguely slanty, as representing a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, a ship name, or some other prose whose typical typographic presentation is italicized.

Note typical: the contents of an i element don't actually have to be displayed in italics.

In light of this, the spec also introduces the í element (note the acute accent), which represents a really, really italic bit of text; it adds that user agents should render text within an í element with a dynamic ‘whoosh!’ effect.

The spam element

HTML 4 introduced the span element, which represents a generic run of text. It's used all over the place in HTML, as a semantically correct way to mark up absolutely anything just for fun.

HTML 5 corrects a typo in the HTML 4 spec and renames this element to spam.