I am taking a peek at Dive Into HTML5. It seems nice and interesting, but I am puzzled.
In the 1990s, at the time when Netscape was the browser and HTML was HTML2 or HTML3, there were a lot of tags: address, cite, code… Most of them are unused as of today, probably even obsolete.
HTML5 introduces tags to express “semantic meaning” to the tag itself. This is all fun and games, but I see something very strange in this approach. Technically, the semantics can be very open ended. HTML5 has tags for article, time, navigation bars, footer. Why shouldn’t it contain tags for post icon, author’s place, name and surname, or whatever else you want to assign specific semantics to (I’m confident <rant> and <nsfw> would be very important tags): ? I thought XML was the strategy to assign semantics to stuff. Nothing forbids you to put an XML chunk under a XHTML div element, and assign a stylesheet to it so to style it properly, or to delegate to the proper viewer the handling of that namespace (for example, when handling RSS or SVG).
In conclusion, I don’t understand the reason behind this extensions focused towards semantics, when it’s clear that semantic is a very broad topic, which is guaranteed to require a potentially infinite amount of semantic tags. Since I am pretty sure there are clever people at W3C, I think I’m wrong, but I’d like to know why.
Why are tags for article, time, navigation bars, footer useful?
Because they facilitate parsing for text processing tools like Google.
It’s nothing about semantics (at least in ‘broad’ meaning). Instead they just say: here is the body of page (most important text part) and there is the navigation bar full of links. With such an approach you can easily extract just what you need.