I know that a lot of developers have their own ideas and opinions on new elements that could be added to the HTML 5 specification. And, although there is a lot of qualified people involved in the WHATWG or the HTML Working Group, I think that the rest of us can also come up with some interesting pointers, theories or ideas, seeing this from a completely different point of view.

So I thought, why not write a post to ask for your ideas and opinions?

For instance, the first thing that came to my mind when thinking about writing this post was a simple one: <advertising>. And I bet I’m not the first one to think about it.

Advertising on a website is something that is totally objective (there’s no doubt, at least for the developer, on what is and what isn’t advertising) and there isn’t a standard way to include it. Reading the definition of the new elements in HTML 5, I even feel that advertising doesn’t fit in any of them (though it crossed my mind that, if aside should be used to identify something related to the main content, contextual advertising could somehow be considered an aside).

A specific element could help not only to identify advertising on a site, but maybe help to standardize the way it’s used or showed in browsers. The obvious con, and the reason that I think this would never really work, is that using a standard tag for all advertising would lead to an easier way for users to hide it or block it, so most advertisers would always choose to include advertising using the same tags specified for common content.

Anyway, that was my little idea. Maybe not that helpful, but I think at least it could point to some other ideas about dealing with advertising using HTML 5.

What other new types of elements is HTML 5 missing?