Document outlines have changed a bit in HTML5. For a start, they’re actually in the spec! The HTML5 Doctor is here to explain what document outlines are, how to make good ones, and why you should care.

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.

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

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).

We’re back with our first round up of your questions for 2010. In this article we’ll be covering a range of topics including sections and sectioning, the img element, scaling video and a proposal for a field element.

Lately I decided I was going to recreate the interactive features of the details element using JavaScript (apparently the same day as fellow Brightonian Jeremy Keith). However I ran in to some very serious issues with the tag, so serious, in it’s current state, it’s unusable.

Without going into the discussion of why HTML 5 is available today and not 2022, this article is going to give you a series of HTML 5 boilerplates that you can use in your projects right now. HTML 5 in 5 seconds It’s über easy to get your markup to validate as HTML 5 — […]

One of the new elements for HTML 5 is the <nav> element which allows you to group together links, resulting in more semantic meaning for your markup, and help help structure the content for screenreaders. In this article I’ll discuss how and where to use it as well as some reservations I have with the specifications definition.

I like the xhtml syntax. It’s how I learned. I’m used to lowercase code, quoted attributes and trailing slashes on elements like br and img. They make me feel nice and comfy, like a cup of Ovaltine and The Evil Dead on the telly. But you might not. You might want SHOUTY UPPERCASE tags, no […]