Is there an advantage of the new HTML5 elements?

Question

HTML5 introduces some nice new elements, , , and , that will be useful in web design.

Answer 1

A recent statement from Hixie, the HTML5 editor, says: “The use case for most of the ‘semantic’ markup is [just] easier authoring and maintenance, in particular for se­lec­tors in CSS.”

When authors use tags in certain ways, the markup is easier to read and modify to coworkers or others who work on the same markup. It is not realistic to expect (though admittedly possible) that browsers will do anything special with these elements (except render them as blocks and not inline elements) or that search engines will get enthusiastic about them.

Answer 2

The advantage is mainly semantic. It's somewhat easier to maintain the code, and web crawlers can more easily determine where certain information is in the page.