As some of you would of heard the hgroup
element is being removed from the HTML5 Specification. (For more info, see the W3C HTML Working Group\'s decision on reques
I would go with the alternative suggested by the W3C in the drop hgroup change proposal proposed by Lars Gunther and use header and paragraph.
Your example would look like this
<header>
<h1>Darren Reay</h1>
<p>A developing web developer</p>
</header>
I feel this reads correctly and semantically.
The HTML5 spec now includes advice on how to mark up Subheadings, subtitles, alternative titles and taglines
This is the technique that I currently use on my personal site to achieve the effect of having a heading with a sub-title:
<header>
<h1>
<a href="http://www.jdclark.org/">Jordan Clark</a>
<small>Personal and Professional Website</small>
</h1>
</header>
(Then, of course, I simply use CSS to re-style the <small>
element. I also personally believe that my technique is more semantically accurate than just using a paragraph -- and although I am no SEO expert, I am sure that by keeping the sub-title text within the h1
would give it higher value than a basic paragraph.)
A couple of points to consider:
Even if the tag is removed from the HTML5 specification, it doesn't mean that it would stop working overnight. Browsers keep backwards compatibility for a long time (AFAIK most if not all browsers still render <font>
correctly!)
Even if the browsers would drop support overnight, they'd still render the page correctly because I don't think the hgroup tag adds any inherent styling and (modern) browsers are very lenient in allowing tags they don't recognize.
I might be reading the question wrong, but between the lines it sounds like you've been misusing the hgroup tag anyway. (It's not allowed to contain anything other than header elements.)
I don't see any problem in either dropping the tags completely or replacing them with divs.