O div you are so great,
The other elements have less weight,
Your supremacy is clear,
No bold, acronym or tt gets near,
You are silent but strong,
Used a lot you can’t go wrong,
Without you we’d be stuck in table glue,
You freed our formats it is true,
So, this is my ode to div,
The element with the most to give.

On the days i’m coding up a long compilcated form, when the complication of nesting, cascades, business logic almost seem too much – the fieldset is a lovely warm blanket there to tell me everything’s going to be all right with the world.

God bless you, fieldset.

For me, tt has been there since the beginning, when I first got access to the Internet (at a local library, early ’90s). I had an old 8088 at home that I ran a bulletin-board system with, as well as a mac se. Neither of those did it for me, so upon finding the Internet and the Web, I found html. Once I discovered I had enormous edit control, I went apeshizz with the tt! Sure, I colored everything, had hundreds of animated rules on the page… even bored people to tears with blinking tags… but tt was and is still the bomb to me.

I’m talking about THEAD. (And TBODY and TFOOT, too, but I can choose only one.)

THEAD is a very cool element. Wrapped around the top row of a data table, it provides an extremely easy way of styling the top table header cells (TH is another element I love) differently from the table header cells starting each row, without having a class attribute on the first (or sometimes second, too) table row.

Here’s another cool feature, although I’m not sure about actual browser support for this. In paged media, the THEAD (and the TFOOT) is repeated on each new page. This means that if the table is so long that it is broken over several pages, the browser ought to automatically repeat the column headers on every page.

Finally, like a poster above said about the CAPTION element, the presence of THEAD is a good sign that the content author actually understands the value and meaning of semantic HTML, and that the table is not presentational garbage, but instead a pure and beautiful data table, as it was meant to be.

I love all the rare table elements: CAPTION, TH, COLGROUP and COL. But most of them all, I like the THEAD – it contains the TBRAINS of the table

Things is, there already is a nice element in the HTML spec for some of this. HTML 3 that is. The NOTE element. In the days of AJAX and applications everywhere it certainly would be nice to have. Go NOTE!

Robert: That’s what you get for not specifying what version of HTML we should pick from

I’m pretty sure it’s obvious as to why it’s my favourite. Without that little baby, we wouldn’t have websites.

Why? Because its a nice word. I mean, abbr, q, em, img, p and many of the others are swell chaps, but their names are just not poetic. And besides, legend is a bit of an elusive element, hiding amongst the cloud-ridden tops of the form and its mighty fieldset. And in may, just as the cherry blossoms turn white and…. oh crap, I can’t do this. Sorry, just don’t have the poker face for it.

My slogan?
“Legend – Because It’s Just A Nice Word.”

HTML is optional in HTML 4

So is BODY, then.

But only if you mean TAG, not element. Both elements are always there, if you are indeed talking about valid HTML and not crap soup.