The Address Element
Web design, Semantics, Coding - 29/11/2005 at 15:09 CET
As Tantek Çelik said in his excellent WE05 presentation, the address element is perhaps the worst named HTML element. I definately agree there. A couple of months have passed since WE05, but it was only yesterday, when I had a chat with my friend Å ime, that I realized I didn’t properly understand how the address element should be used.
The address element isn’t for marking up literal addresses, said Tantek. It’s not for marking up all addresses on a site.
So, what’s it for, then? Marking up the contact information for a document.
Here’s a quote from the W3C HTML 4.01 specification:
The ADDRESS element may be used by authors to supply contact information for a document or a major part of a document such as a form.
In his presentation, Tantek also gave us a nice example of using the element:
<div>
Please contact
<address>webmaster at example dot com</address>
if you find any problems with this site.
</div>
You’ve probably seen something like that in page footers plenty of times.
But wait! One has to feel just a little bit confused by the examples on W3 Schools and HTML Dog. From those, you naturally think it’s OK to use the element on every address you have on a site. They gave general examples and didn’t provide thorough explanations.
I took another listen at the presentation, but Tantek also didn’t go into much detail with this.
More investigation was necessary, and the next Google search shed a lot more light on the subject:
The ADDRESS element provides contact information for a document or part of a document. Information provided by ADDRESS may include the names of the document’s maintainers, links to the maintainers’ Web pages, e-mail addresses for feedback, postal addresses, phone numbers, and so on. The ADDRESS element is not appropriate for all postal and e-mail addresses; it should be reserved for providing such information about the contact people for the document.
So, there you go, a proper explanation, finally!.
There is no proper use yet for the address element, though maybe in future, search engines will support it as a method of looking up addresses but untill now it is rather redundant.
Author: Fabian De Rango, December 3rd, 2005 at 9:52
@Fabian: redundant? Why? It’s a way of describing contact info, making it semantic.
Author: Bojan, December 3rd, 2005 at 11:45
I never used adresse before, I think I’ll use it now.
Author: Marko, December 8th, 2005 at 20:19
not sure if i’m a little late, or if anyone cares anymore… but I also did a bit of research on teh tag before, and found that it is needed to pass some form of accessibility… it’s the WCAG 1.0 level AAA that requires an address element to be on a page.
although searching google it’s pretty damn hard to find any documentation about it, and the only reason I know is because I thought it’d be cute to test my site on: http://checker.atrc.utoronto.ca/ which let’s you evaluate against all sorts of accessibility guidelines :)
by the way, hi ;)
Author: simon goellner, December 23rd, 2005 at 1:00
Simon, thanks for the info. Of course you’re not too late.
Level AAA requires the address element? I’m finding it hard to find info about that… Can you point me to a site where this is documented perhaps?
Author: Bojan, December 23rd, 2005 at 1:43
Hey again, well as I mentioned, it’s tough to find info about it on google, and I scoured the W3 website with no avail…
but if you follow this hyperlink and then just to the right of the “login” button, there is a “change guideline” link, click it and select WCAG1.0 AAA… and then… (lol) click on the general errors and you can see that the website fails because it has no address element.
I use the word “fail” but Accessibility is qualitive not quantitive I believe… anyhow, It’s a good element to have in your page, and requires very little coding… so why not have it?
Author: simon goellner, December 23rd, 2005 at 15:04
sorry for the spam, but there is no edit function :p
anyway, after looking into it, I think that the requirement of the address element is a “interpretation” that the Toronto University have of the WCAG guidelines, since the guidelines are there to simply “guide” you…
if you interpret that quote form the WCAG guidelines, marking up a site’s author’s email address with the tag would be qualitively satisfying this guideline, and not providing it would be unsatisfactory… in my opinion :)
hope that helps a little?
Author: simon goellner, December 23rd, 2005 at 15:23
Indeed, it points out that there is no address element. I’ve then tried the Cynthia Says Validator and the Watchfire WebXACT Validator, but they don’t mention it.
From that, and from what I’ve read elsewhere, I’d agree with you that the address element is optional. Unlike for instance labeling the input element, the address element is a plus, rather than a necessity.
Thanks for your comments and reminding us about the accessibility side of this.
Author: Bojan, December 23rd, 2005 at 15:35