What happened to the menu tag?
We all try to write our markup to be as semantic as possible. We use proper heading tags, paragraph tags, strong instead of b, em instead of i, and tables only for tabular data. Yet when it comes to our sites “navigation”, we use an unordered list.
Both XHTML 2.0 and HTML 5 attempt to fix this by creating new elements. XHTML 2.0 has the nl element, and HTML 5 has the nav element. But semantically, navigation is incorrect. What we are really talking about is a menu, for which an element has existed in HTML since the beginning. This element was deprecated with HTML 4 and dropped with XHTML 1.1, yet all browsers still support it, and I doubt it will go away soon. It is marked up exactly the same as the ul element, li elements and all, and visually, it renders and can be styled exactly like the ul element, but semantically it says “I am a list of choices”, while an unordered list just says “I am a list”. If I ever actually get around to adding menus to this site, I plan to use the menu element until browsers stop supporting it.