I've been thinking a lot about Habari themes over the past few weeks and one of the things I have given some thought to is whether it is time to start using the HTML5 tags, either the tags themselves, or as class naming conventions.

There is certainly a part of me that wants to just switch to the new tags immediately. They may not be universally supported but the good browsers should support them and, while I have no intention of modifying any of my themes for IE6 anyway, there is a bit of a hack that applies to IE in general.

I really like the idea of marking up content as an article, and asides as asides. I haven't tended to use asides much in my writing but given specific structural methods of putting them on the page (and corresponding changes to the publish form in Habari) I might well do.

Right now, for example, it would great to have an aside with the major new tags listed, but with no way to acomplish that with this theme you just need to wait until later down the page.

On the other hand, adopting the HTML 5 tag names as class naming conventions, with an eye to switching them all out at a later date, is also appealing. Not least because it gives me a structure to follow that has been defined, but also because it is a great learning experience about the tags anyway.

It also occurred to me that, as a cutting edge platform, Habari (the project as a whole) should probably be encouraging the use of HTML 5 already anyway. At least in the official themes. There is something to be said for being ahead of the game on this and just be consistent would be useful on its own.

I am still not decided whether to use HTML 5 in my new theme efforts, but while I think about it here are some useful links on the subject: