In the vast majority of today’s websites, if a program is required to pick out a particular part of a HTML page, such as the main article, the sidebar or the top navigation, it would have to be programmed to do so on a per website and web page basis. This is because every website structures its HTML differently, unless based on an underlying package with a consistent HTML foot print.

Most current websites therefore use a variety of <p>, <div> and <span> tags to surround their content. These tags define style and do not obviously determine whether the contained content is part of the website’s navigation system or whether it is the main article or focus of the web page. The new HTML 5 tags aim to change this by explicitly defining content.

Defining content with specific HTML 5 tags will make websites easier to parse by computer programs. This could benefit accessibility readers for the blind and allow content aggregating systems and ‘mash-up’ websites to easily parse, link to and cite your articles. Content aggregation and automation of web page content retrieval is quite fundamental to some of the newer Web 2.0 sites and social networks. Good examples being Facebook’s automatic retrieval of web page information when a link is entered into a status update, or Reddit’s automatic thumbnail generation based on images found within the linked web page.

Here is a listed on related HTML content tags, as available from the W3C Schools website.

• <article> – Defines a main article on a page. Can include cite (citation) and pubdate (publishing date) attributes.
• <details> – States content details for a specific section. Can include an open attribute defining whether or not the details within are visible to the end-user.
• <figcaption> – States the caption for a figure as defined by the figure tag.
• <figure> – Usually used to group a set of elements.
• <footer> – Footer layout element. This is used to contain the footer content of the page, usually contains the website name, author and copyright information.
• <header> – Header layout element. This tag is designed to contain the top header of a document, usually showing the website logo, page and/or company title and subtitle.
• <hgroup> – A tag used to group together heading tags such as <h1>, <h2>, <h3> and so on.
• <keygen> – A key generation tag which defines a generated (encryption) key that can be associated with a HTML form.
• <meter> – The <meter> tag contains content which is deemed to be a measurement of some sort.
• <nav> – The <nav> tags stands for navigation and is designed to surround navigation links, such as those present in a sidebar bar or navigational header/footer.
• <summary> – The <summary> tag defines the title of a <details> element.
• <time> – This tags contains content which is a statement or measurement of time and/or date/time.

Unfortunately, it is likely that HTML 5 content tags with not be adopted completely for quite some time and there will likely continued use of existing HTML mark up and related styling of <div> and <span> tags for quite some time.

The inclusion of C:\\fakepath\\ is a security feature of Internet Explorer 8, designed to prevent information regarding the file system structure being exposed when files are selected via a file input box. Current versions of most other web browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, will return the file name without any path (relative or absolute).

The HTML5 specification states that the browser’s implementation of a file upload control should not reveal the true path to the file via its ‘value’ attribute. Internet Explorer, as always, does this differently than other browsers by including ‘fakepath’ rather than just removed the local path in its entirety.

This behaviour of Internet Explorer 8 can be overridden by added the size to the list of trusted sites within Internet Explorer 8 Internet options window. I’d personally only recommend this if the system is an secure internal and/or Intranet web-based system which requires the use of the full path.

Ideally, existing systems should be recoded to either not use the full path or to retrieve the full path via another method, such as manual input into a text input field.

I hope this post helps web developers who have unexpectedly come across this strange ‘fakepath’ and been unaware of where it was coming from.