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HTML How to Make a Website Creating HTML Content Create Navigation with Lists

Kenneth Simpson
Kenneth Simpson
1,162 Points
Posted by Kenneth Simpson
Kenneth Simpson
1,162 Points

Still confused about the <nav> tag?

I am just a little confused about why the <nav> tag is needed. Couldn't you just use the unordered list items with the <a href .....></a> without having the <nav> tag wrapped around them? What is the purpose of the <nav> tag?

index.html 
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Nick Pettit</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <header>
      <a href="index.html">
        <h1>Nick Pettit</h1>
        <h2>Designer</h2>
      </a>
      <nav>
        <ul>
        </ul>
      </nav>
    </header>
    <section></section>
    <footer>
      <p>&copy; 2013 Nick Pettit.</p>
    </footer>
  </body>
</html>

1 Answer

William Li
PLUS
William Li
Courses Plus Student 26,868 Points
William Li
William Li
Courses Plus Student 26,868 Points

You're right, you don't have to use nav tags at all, but you should. The nav is new tag in HTML5 that use to group together major navigation section on a page.

Before html5, developer would do something like this instead.

<ul class="nav">
</ul>

Remember, nav itself bears no syntactic significance, it is only here to provide semantic structure of your HTML page, so that you can better group your tag elements in a way that make sense, and easier to style them using CSS.