HTML `` Tag

Wrap your keyboard command text with <kbd>. Great to use especially in documentations! It's more semantically correct & allows you to target it to apply some nice styling. You can also use this tag for other user input such as voice input or text entry device

HTML

<kbd>Ctrl</kbd>

Styling

CSS

kbd {  border: 1px solid lime;  border-radius: 5px;  padding: 5px;}

Output

ctrl

Default Styling

Here's how it looks like without any styling:

<kbd>Ctrl</kbd><p>Ctrl</p>

Output

As you can tell, it looks quite plain . It simply just has the monspace font. If you open it up in your dev tools, this is what you will get:

/* Default Style */kbd {  font-family: monospace;}

Auto Styling in GitHub & Dev Markdown

But something interesting I discovered. If you use the standard <kbd> in GitHub's or Dev.to's markdown. It looks very similar to the style I have in my code tidbit. This is great to add some pizzaz to your README files Another reason to use the correct HTML tags

Use Case

This is super useful when writing documentations. I remember I use to always just used the <code> tag and then apply some sort of class to target it for styling. But after doing some googling, I found this a more semantic solution, <kbd>. That's why Google is a programmer's best friend

Bad

To copy text, you can use the keyboard shortcut:<code>Ctrl</code> + <code>c</code>

Good

To copy text, you can use the keyboard shortcut:<kbd>Ctrl</kbd> + <kbd>c</kbd>

code vs kbd

So I mentioned that I use to use the <code> tag. Let's look at what that does.

From your browser, it might not make any difference with the default styling. They both are using the monospace font-family. But semantically they are identified differently.

<kbd>: Text that indicates user input from a keyboard, voice input, or any other text entry device.

<code>: Text that indicates a short fragment of a computer code.

Community Input

What other HTML5 tags should I cover next?

• @JelteHomminga: <details>
• @JimSaiya: <samp>
• @funksweat: <canvas>
• @tiagombp: <meter>

fieldset

@percy_burton: Learnt more about fieldset recently. Thought it was just for radio buttons or checkboxes, but can be to group any related form items, I believe. Great for Accessibility too

@JelteHomminga: And useful to set the whole set of fields to disabled instead of doing that for each input separately

Resources

• MDN Web Docs: kbd
• MDN Web Docs: code
• w3schools: kbd
• w3schools: code
• Stack Overflow: What are the differences between kbd, samp and code in HTML
• HTML Spec: kbd
• HTML kbd Tag

Thanks for reading
Say Hello! Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Blog | SamanthaMing.com