Should I use <ul>s and <li>s inside my <nav>s?

Now that we have a dedicated <nav> tag,

Is this:

<nav>
  <ul>
    <li><a href="#foo">foo</a></li>
    <li><a href="#bar">bar</a></li>
    <li><a href="#baz">baz</a></li>
  </ul>
</nav>

any better than the following?

<nav>
  <a href="#foo">foo</a>
  <a href="#bar">bar</a>
  <a href="#baz">baz</a>
</nav>

Assuming that I don't need an extra DOM level for some CSS positioning/padding, what is the preferred way, and why?

Solution 1:

the nav element and the list provide different semantical information:

• The nav element communicates that we're dealing with a major navigation block

• The list communicates that the links inside this navigation block form a list of items

At http://w3c.github.io/html/sections.html#the-nav-element you can see that a nav element could also contain prose.

So yes, having a list inside a nav element does add meaning.

Solution 2:

For me, the unordered lists are extra markup that aren't really required. When I look at an HTML document, I want it to be as clean and easy to read as possible. It's already clear to the viewer that a list is being presented if proper indentation is used. Thus, adding the UL to these a tags is unnecessary and makes for reading the document more difficult.

Although you may gain some flexibility, I believe it's a better idea to not bloat the markup with unsemantic ul classes and to style the a elements in one fell swoop. And you have no excuse: use the :before and :after pseudo-selectors.

Edit: I have been made aware that some ARIA screen readers treat lists differently than simple anchor tags. If your website is geared towards disabled people, I might consider using the list-based approach.

Solution 3:

At this point, I'd keep the <ul><li> elements, reason being that not all browsers support HTML5 tags yet.

For example, I ran into an issue using the <header> tag - Chrome and FF worked like a charm, but Opera borked.

Until all browsers support HTML completely, I'd stick them in, but rely on the old ones for backwards compatibility.