HTML Guide for navigation

The navigation landmark role is used to identify major groups of links used for navigating through a website or page content. It can be added to an element that contains navigation links by using role="navigation", but instead it’s preferable to just use the <nav> element. In that case, it’s unnecessary to make the navigation role explicit.

Examples:

<div role="navigation">
  <!-- this is a valid way to define a navigation role -->
</div>

<nav>
   <!-- but this is shorter and uses correct semantic HTML  -->
</nav>