<nav> - Is it that important?

I noticed that if you remove the nav element in HTML5, the list of links remain the sa开发者_如何学JAVAme with or with out nav.

So, what is the use of nav in this case? What is it adding to me.

Yes,W3Schools.com mentions the following about nav:

The tag defines a section of navigation links.

But, as I mentioned, what is the use of adding a section that even if removed the impact will be identical?

Thanks.

Remember that HTML was, originally, intended to be a markup language to make digital copies of documents more accessible. Trends moved it away from that to a creative tool, but HTML5 seems to be returning to that original concept.

<nav> adds a specific type of unordered list – a list that indicates it is specifically meant as navigation. What this is 'adding to you' is a more universally identifiable document markup – whether you speak the language of the document or not, you can identify the regions to help you navigate. Yes, the screen readers, search engines, etc. have all been mentioned, but this is a human-friendly component as well. Looking solely at the source, one can identify how the document should be understood or organized. The potential benefit of this in document processing of all sorts (including PDF layout for publishers) is incalculable.

Remember that semantics carry the meaning of the words. You're marking up a portion of text so that text makes sense in context. <div> has no meaning, but <article>, <section> and <nav> all tell you what the text contained within the tags means to the overall document.

While you usually would write a <div id="nav">, you can now use <nav> instead. It's just more semantic and little else.

This will be helpful for mobile browsers and for other challenged environments where the user might want to have an easy jump at the navigation. It'll be easy for the browser to find the navigation that way.

Continue to use W3Schools as a reference source and you will go far ;)

Your question, might be better answered with taking a few examples... and then explaining why it matters... But the TL;DR version is to do with semantics.

• If you have a block of text, why do you wrap it in a <p> tag, when you don't need to. You can just as happily use a <span>, then set display:inline, set the margin-top:10px that a <p> uses and continue.

• Also why do you wrap your content blocks in a <div>, it's to demarcate your content into meaningful areas.

Well that is kind of what does. It signifies to screen readers, search engines, and even your CSS selectors if you choose, that everything into of this tag, should semantically be considered as a navigation block.

You don't need it, but it will certainly help assign relevance to your page content.

It adds semantics. A screen reader could be coded to skip over nav elements automatically, or a search engine bot could be coded not to include text in the nav element in the search result snippet.

Right now there aren't any implementations of these use cases that I am aware of, but as you can just use a nav instead of a div, there isn't really any reason not to.