Yes, the return of sidebar would be good. I use aside for the sidebar on this site as that’s what the spec says I should do, and we have to follow the spec whether we agree with it or not.

The more you use HTML5 the more it makes sense. Using div for articles, headers, sections and sidebars now seems plain odd. The thing to remember, I think, is that every element can have its own internal structure (so articles can have headers and footers, for example, but not bodies — but that’s a different matter), and that each new element starts a new heading hierarchy. Which means lots of h1s.

I just think that HTML5 lacks a little on Context. Many tags have their semantics, in a global way all makes senses. But somecodes become odd because they lack context between the tag and its parents.

I also like the open development, even if it can make things seem chaotic; there’s a spec, of course, and there’s a lot of discussion around the spec (HTML5 Doctor, for example). It’s obviously still being developed, so there are bound to be changes (there actually was a sidebar tag a while back, and aside‘s purpose has been extended). I guess the more examples of how we map common HTML4 pages to HTML5 (or XHTML to HTML5) we see, the more we’ll agree on actual usage.

My favourite thing about HTML5 is that you can write XHTML style (self-closing tags) markup, making switching between HTML5 and XHTML5 very easy. I’m currently building my first HTML5 site, and have spent a few days reading up on the spec and its changes. Overall I think it’s nice and an improvement.