The address element

Michael Gearon Published on September 27, 2023

The address HTML element (<address>) is a way to define that the content within the address provides contact information for a person, people or an organisation. The contact information can be a range of information such as:

• email address
• phone number
• social media handles
• physical address
• geographic coordinates

When using the address element, the contact information provided will be applied to the nearest article or body element ancestor. For example, if you had an blog post on a website you may put the content of that blog post in an article element as well as the author details, including contact information which would be contained in an address element. By doing this we are then saying, this is the contact information for the author who wrote this article.

You may also have contact information for the whole website, for example, on most websites the contact information is in the footer. Again we will use the address element to give context and because it’s nearest ancestor will be the body element then it’s assumed that the contact information is for the whole document.

This gives us the ability to use multiple address elements on a web page.

More HTML tutorials

• The Block Quotation element
• Scroll to text fragment: How to link & highlight any text on a web page
• A Guide to HTML Tables

First published on September 27, 2023