The footer Element

The final element we’ll discuss in this chapter is the footer element. As with header, you can have multiple footer elements on a single page, and you should use footer instead of something generic such as <div id="footer">. 

A footer element, according to the spec, represents a footer for the section of content that is its nearest ancestor. The section of content could be the entire document, or it could be a section, article, or aside element.
Often a footer will contain copyright information, lists of related links, author information, and 
similar information that you normally think of as coming at the end of a block of content; however, much like aside and header, a footer element is not defined in terms of its position on the page, so it does not have to appear at the end of a section, or at the bottom of a page. Most likely it will, but this is not required. For example, information about the author of a blog post might be displayed above the post instead of below it, and will still be considered footer information.

How did we get here?

If you're wondering a little bit about the path to HTML5 and how we ended up
with the tags that we did, you might want to check out Luke Stevens' book calledThe Truth about HTML5. Currently in its 2nd edition, Luke's book is somewhat controversial. In addition to covering many of the HTML5 technologies such as video and canvas, he also goes in-depth in his coverage of the history of HTML5, explaining some of the semantic and accessibility problems inherent in the new elements and providing some recommendations on how to handle these issues.