What is HTML5 tag header nav section article main footer

Hey there, this video is all about learning what The HTML5 Structure Tags are. They are things like Header, Main, Footer, and Nav, and you can come and see, they're pretty simple, they're just containers that we put stuff in. Exactly like a Div, except we give them special names, because they do special things. Pretty easy to do, let's jump in now and learn what they are. 

All right, so what are these HTML5 structural elements? Basically HTML4, what we used to do is what we've done until now. We just make a Div tag, division of space, kind of a box. We give it a Class Name, then style it over here, in our CSS, and that works fine. We'd have a box at the top for our Heading, a box for our Navigation, a box for the main parts, box for the Footer. We just create all these Divs with all these names over here. 

So what they decided in HTML5 is like, hey, whoever is using these things, wouldn't it be nice to have an actual tag? Instead of writing Div equals, blah, blah, blah, you just write Nav, okay. And at the end we're going to close the Nav, same with this one here. Maybe this is the main part of our content. We'll just call it 'Main'. And over here call it 'Main', spelled it right. And over here, style the word Main. So that's what it is. They're just replacing some commonly used Div tags with some pre-existing names. 

Now other than that there's not a lot of difference between Divs and these kind of predefined names. They're just ready to go. There must be some accessibility options, for like screen readers that might use these types of tags. I have to do a bit more research in that, it's never come up in my work. I'm going to undo this because I'm wrecking this document. 

So what are these tags? There are some main ones. They're all kind of suggestions. So I'm at w3schools.com, and here's a bunch of their kind of new structural tags. There's basically just a couple of them that get used. You should, if you're going to be like the best HTML5 implementer in the world, go through and research them all, and use them all perfectly. What you'll find is that most people pick the good ones, and there's a lot of confusion about where you should use some of these. And because the-- like pros and cons, well, the pros aren't huge for adding them, other than it's just a bit clearer, people don't use them. So I guess I want to be honest about that so that we're not--

So I'm not telling you have to use these tags. Now I made a little handy, in your Exercise Files, a little drawing. Why am I drawing these? I don't know, I could use Illustrator. I feel like it's proper, if I go into Wireframes-- if you go into Wireframes in your Exercise Files, I've made these two. So there's HTML Structure A and B. I'll show you two really common kind of uses of them. So instead of putting Div, Header, we're just going to use the Header tag. The Nav, this is what I normally do. I throw in a website, this outside box, the kind of green one, doesn't have a name, they should have just put one in called Container, that everybody uses in Web Design, but they didn't. 

So there's no name for this outside one, you have to give it a Div name, but inside of here I often put my Header. Inside of that Header, I put my logo over here. There's no specific HTML tag for logo, so you'll put that in as a separate element, but there is a Nav, so I put the Nav in there, often in the top right. This big section in the middle, I call it the Main. Well, I call it Main, it's actually a pre-defined, you can kind of see it over here, it's actually a pre-defined HTML5 tag. 

What we think about Main is that, that one doesn't get used very often, I'm like, "Why wouldn't you?" Such a good explanation of what this area is, but anyway. And Footer is a really easy one. So that's what I do. I want to show another way of working that-- I see a lot of other sites done, I guess I don't want you to all follow me perfectly, because there's different ways of doing it. So again, the big blue thing around the outside is-- doesn't have a specific name, we'll give it a name in a second, but Header, so I wanted to show you this one as well, because Header-- the Nav doesn't have to be inside the Header to work. You can have the Header, and you can have your logo, and some graphics going up there, but you can have your navigation separately. 

Your navigation could be down the side, though nobody does that anymore. Then you've got your Footer, we've already talked about. You got these three, these are common enough. An Aside is pretty easy. If you've got a Web Design where you've got a Sidebar, or something, often it's like related articles or latest Twitter feeds. You can have this, you can put it inside a Div tag called Aside. And it's clear, great. These two are the ones that are real confusing. So this is how I interpret how it was set out. 

So you have an article, and it's unique to that page, it might be a blog post, it might be-- you're writing about a topic, and then within that article you have sections. So you might have a main kind of article but you might have some bullet points, or like little FAQs, or kind of pull quotey extra bits. And you might have ten sections or two sections, but you have a main article. There is arguments on sites where that can be completely the other way around. You have a section, and you have articles within the section, and you have multiple articles on the page. The documentation is not super clear. 

I guess I wanted to share the uncleariness because you might get to one website where they're being very, very deliberate about using articles, and then sections within the articles, and then you get to another site and they've done something, they've implemented this article section thing completely different. You'd be like, "Hey." If that happens, if you get to that "Hey" moment, it's not you, it's the internet. Clear, clear, clear, clear, weird. But a lot of people don't use Main, that's why I didn't include it here. 

So we've learned what these kind of tags are. Just replacements for Divs with special names. We are going to go start building our actual project structure in the next video. See you in a sec.