Is it absolutely necessary to use lists inside of <nav> tags?

Question

This question may be silly but I saw a lot of navigation sections that don't look like lists. ALL the links are on a single line. I saw a youtube tutorial on creating homepages. The instructor in that video made a flat navigation. He used an unordered list like in the lesson on Sololearn https://www.sololearn.com/learn/HTML/2199/
Then he spent time styling the list to make it NOT LOOK LIKE A LIST. Why? is there any rule, conventions about nav in html5?

Answer 1

Well, the short answer is NO.

The reason they did that in those tutorials is simple: they wanted to manipulate a set of block level elements, logically grouped together. Web devs used to do that way before the <nav> element was introduced. Typically the code would look like this:

<div>
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>Contacts</li>
<li>About</li>
</ul>
</div>

So they just replaced div tags with nav tags. More like a habit than a rule. It's just easier to select specific child elements that way.

You can style your elements however you like, but I insist you should use classes for styling.

Answer 2

Thanks again Rincewind for providing me a good resourse at https:seespsrkbox.com
I honestly read both articles and made my conclusions. It is all about personal preferences not rules or conventions and I guess I've made my choise alredy.
I mark your answer as the best one. Good luck.

Answer 3

Thank you Vitya :) ! This explanation is much better. Now I know more.

Answer 4

This is a great question, and I found an article here arguing for lists in navs (with a link at the bottom to someone arguing against them): https://seesparkbox.com/foundry/why_i_like_lists_in_nav_elements

It makes a good argument - it's easier to add a submenu if your nav is structured like a list.