Origin of HTML5 element names

The origin of HTML5 element names derives from a Google research on the most used element nomenclatures on the web. Google simply analyzed an impressive number of web documents and found out that many web authors used the same nomenclature for naming their page elements. Sadly, this nomenclature has more to do with page presentation than page semantics and structure. The original form of these elements used div elements together with ID or class attributes to convey a functional meaning to the elements in question. Some of these elements are reported in the following table, together with their corresponding HTML counterpart.

HTML5 and HTML elements

HTML5 element	HTML element
article	<div id="article"></div>
aside	<div id="aside"></div>
footer	<div id="footer"></div>
header	<div id="header"></div>
nav	<div id="nav"></div>
section	<div id="section"></div>