As you may well have heard this week, hgroup has been in, out and in the spec again, while members of the W3C and others have truly been shaking it all about. If you’ve missed this latest merry dance then please head on over to the W3 bug report page to help get a clearer indication.

At the beginning of the year, all seven of the HTML5 Doctors met up and started to discuss the problem of browser support within the realm of HTML5, CSS3 and all the sexy new APIs.

Through our handy Ask The Doctor service, we get a lot of e-mails asking us about HTML5’s effect on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). While we can’t answer in great detail (Messrs Google, Yahoo, Bing, and their friends haven’t sent us in-depth details of their algorithms), we’ve rounded up some useful facts from Google, the world’s most dominant search engine.

Here’s nice and simple Simplquiz for Christmas. Imagine a new site, with a news item in an <article> element. Within that are several user-submitted comments, each of which is in its own <article> element, as the spec recommends. Most commenting systems ask the commenter for his/ her URL, which is published in the header of the comment, usually as a link with the commenter’s name as the linked text.

The <abbr> element is not new to HTML5, nor has it been redefined. The HTML5 spec has, however, removed the <acronym> element, which was (and is) common in HTML 4 web pages. Simply put, instead of using <acronym>, use <abbr>.

Simplequiz #4 asks about alt text on images that are captioned using HTML5 figure and figcaption. Steve Faulkner moderates this week.

You’ve already learned about the <video> and <canvas> elements, but did you know that they were designed to be used together? In fact, the two elements are absolutely wondrous when you combine them together. I’m going to show off a few super-simple demos using the two elements together, which should help suggest cool future projects for you fellow web authors.

A few years ago, Dan Cederholm published a series of articles called Simplequiz in which he posed some options for marking up a specified piece of content and invited readers to choose the one they felt was the best way to mark that up. The value was in the comments in which people said why they made that choice and debated the options (which means it is THE LAW that you read the preceeding comments before adding your own).

If the video element is the poster boy of HTML5, then canvas is definitely Danny Zuko. The canvas element is (still) part of the HTML5 specification, but the 2D drawing API has been moved into a separate document (in case you go looking and can’t find it).

“Sorry, can you say that again?”, I hear you ask. Certainly: you can still use <div>! Despite HTML5 bringing us new elements like <article>, <section>, and <aside>, the <div> element still has its place. Let the HTML5 Doctor tell you why.