HTML5 introduces some nice new elements, <canvas>, <audio>, and <video>, that will be useful in web design.
What I don’t se is the point of the new <section>, <header>, <nav>, and so on.
I can see a use if you’re a very small web designer, in that they might have user agent stylesheet CSS rules (A bit like <blockquote> is similar to <div>, just has margins as well.)
However, if you’re designing a bigger site, you will probably have you’re own CSS rules for things like these, so there won’t be any benefit.
So s there any real advantage of using these elements?
A recent statement from Hixie, the HTML5 editor, says: “The use case for most of the ‘semantic’ markup is [just] easier authoring and maintenance, in particular for selectors in CSS.”
When authors use tags in certain ways, the markup is easier to read and modify to coworkers or others who work on the same markup. It is not realistic to expect (though admittedly possible) that browsers will do anything special with these elements (except render them as blocks and not inline elements) or that search engines will get enthusiastic about them.