Changes in HTML 5 - <div> Tag

What's new in HTML 5

The introduction of sectioning tags in HTML 5 is intended to reduce the need to use <div> tags for sectioning purposes.

Differences between HTML 5 and earlier versions of HTML

Sections of a page should be identified with the more specific sectioning tags rather than <div> tags. Instead of using <div>s like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
     <title>Page Title</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class="site-heading">
       <h1>My Example Site</h1>
    </div>
    <div class="site-navigation">
       ...
    </div>
    <div class="content">
       <div class="page-heading">
          <h2>Page Heading</h2>
          <div class="page-navigation">
             ...
          </div>
       </div>
       <p>This is the introduction to the article.
       </p>
       <div class="section">
          <h3>Section Heading</h3>
          <p>This is the content of the section.
          </p>
       </div>
       ... additional "section"s ...
       <div class="footer">...</div>
    </div>
    <div class="right-side">
       ...
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

use this structure instead:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
     <title>Page Title</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>My Example Site</h1>
    <nav>
       ...
    </nav>
    <article>
       <header>
          <h2>Page Heading</h2>
          <nav>
             ...
          </nav>
       </header>
       <p>This is the introduction to the article.
       </p>
       <section>
          <h3>Section Heading</h3>
          <p>This is the content of the section.
          </p>
       </section>
       ... additional <section>s ...
       <footer>...</footer>
    </article>
    <aside>
       ...
    </aside>
  </body>
</html>

The following attributes should not be coded on the <div> tag because they either have been deprecated or were never officially supported:

The 2000-2010 Recommendations from the W3C HTML Working Group defined the HTML namespace for the div element type name along with the names of all HTML element types. In older (pre-2000) versions of HTML, element type names were not associated with a namespace.