Building Sidebars with HTML 5`s Aside Element

It's fair to say that HTML 5 as a standard W3C specification remains in an undefined state (at least at the time of this writing). Nevertheless, it’s worth taking a close look at the handy features that come packaged with this newer version of the language and learn right now how to take advantage of their functionality, even though most modern browsers don’t offer reliable support for them yet.

In consonance with this idea, in previous parts of this article series I offered a quick introduction to using some of the most relevant elements that come bundled with HTML 5. These included, among other things, the <header>, <nav> and <footer> tags, which allowed you to easily define the layout of a document without having to use a bunch of generic divs. In addition, I explained how to use the <section> element, which lets you define several sections on a web page with a strong semantic meaning.

Undoubtedly, all of the elements covered so far illustrate the efforts of the W3 Consortium to create a more thorough specification that lets web designers build more semantic and cleaner documents with only minor hassles.

As I demonstrated in preceding parts of this series, HTML 5 comes equipped with a group of specific tags that can be used for building the layout of a web page in an extremely straightforward fashion. The aforementioned <header>, <nav> and <footer> elements are good examples of this ability. However, it’s important to say that the language also includes another handy tag called <aside> which has been specially conceived for defining semantic sidebars on a web page. Therefore, in the course of the following lines I’m going to show you how to work with the <aside> element, as usual by means of a decent variety of easy-to-follow code samples.

Are you ready to learn how to define sidebars in HTML 5 in a few simple steps? Them click on the link below and start reading!