Use HTML5 elements for header, footer, section, etc.

[toddparker]

Use html5 elements like

... ... ...

. We may need to still style against divs, but adding these elements for semantic richness and to be future-looking is a good idea.

Task: research which mobile browsers support these elements, maybe we don't need to double up our markup if all our targets suppor these.

[scottjehl]

We're going to need a shim for mobile IE right? If we decide it's capable for A...

[toddparker]

we need to do a test page and see what devices support these HTML5 elements to decide if we need a JS shim or need to double up markup: div + html5

[scottjehl]

fork here that has some initial work on this. Section elements should probably just use div.
https://github.com/scottjehl/jquery-mobile

[Sumeruter]

Any progress here? I'd like the possibility of using html5 elements. :-)

[scottjehl]

Well, you're free to use them if you'd like. We aren't picky about markup. Just apply the data- attributes to your elements as you would with divs. We haven't given the HTML5 elements adequate testing, but I know you'll have to include an HTML5 shim to make them work in Windows Phone 7 (at least). Not sure if that's worth it when we already embed semantics through ARIA attributes, but that's where we're at with it. :)

[hakanson]

Nicholas Zakas had a good "Using HTML5 semantic elements today" post back in March where he compare four techniques for this. http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2011/03/22/using-html5-semantic-elements-today/

[StevenBlack]

Plain and simple, shim or no, this is a non-starter for IE up to version 8 inclusive,

With a shim you can make a static vanilla page work, but as soon as you have anything dynamic, updating on the fly, fuhgeddaboudit.

[scottjehl]

well, there's innerShim too. But I don't think this is worth the workarounds.

[toddparker]

Closing as won't fix. People can add these semantic elements but we can't rely on these because they require a shim and that is expensive on mobile devices.