How often have you had to write some JavaScript to create an interactive widget that shows and hides some content? You might’ve even downloaded a whole JavaScript library to achieve such an effect. Well, it’s time to rejoice! HTML5 provides a way to create this toggle feature with just a few lines of HTML and no JavaScript in sight. And so we introduce to you the details element.

The details and figure elements are saved from the crazed pecadillos of legend, dd/ dt and caption by these two freshly-minted elements, sent from Hickson over the weekend.

Here we go with another post rounding up your HTML5 questions and sharing the answers with the world. We cover a wide range of topics this time, inlcluding ARIA, storage, offline capabilities, and document outlines, so read on to find the answers. We also want to know what areas of HTML5 you’d like us to […]

This article has been superseded. It’s here for historical reasons only. <details> now uses a <summary> element; <figure> uses <figcaption>. You may recall that I blogged about legend not being so legend as the heading element for details or figure. After enough noise was made the spec was changed so that the heading and contents […]

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.