ColdFusion's CFDIV tag can be used to output HTML5's semantic tags

HTML5 has introduced several semantic tags such as HEADER, FOOTER, SECTION, ARTICLE, ASIDE, NAV etc,. The rationale behind creating these structural tags is to divide the web pages into logical parts with tags that are descriptive of the type of content they contain. Before HTML5 the div tags were used in creating blocks of content in a HTML document.

Recently, I was having a conversation with one of my team members from whom I learnt that the CFDIV tag can be used to output these semantic tags.

The CFDIV tag has an attribute 'tagname'. This attribute can be used to specify the HTML container tag i.e. one can specify tagname="header" to output the header tag. Similarly the tagname attribute can be used to specify other HTML5 semantic tags.

Why should I use CFDIV tag to output the semantic tags?

Well, this is an obvious question you are likely to ask yourself before you write the CFDIV tag. It is not so obvious to one who uses CFDIV tag in their day to day development because CFDIV tag comes with an attribute bind, which is used to specify a bind expression that returns the container contents. One can dynamically populate the tag contents by specifying the bind expression which can be a CFC function, a URL or even a javascript function. You can refer to the CFDIV tag documentation here.

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