This article is quite old. You'll find more recent use cases/examples on the current HTML5 editor's draft (http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html). In its temporal context the author was right (fieldset/legend/abbr weren't that used) but fortunately times have changed a bit and things aren't as bad as he describes.
I must be one of the luck SOBs who learned proper HTML and web development first, having picked up this whole web fad just in the last year (took a long hiatus, my last web app before that was written in 2003.) I have html-generating macros and I use legend, label and abbr within fieldsets throughout my code base (though I usually forget they even exist until I see the generated code.)
The only tag I thought was actually useful is <optgroup>, when you have Categories (labels) in your drop-down <select> that you don't want to be selectable.
Hate to be a jerk, but I really don't see what <address> adds over <div class="address">
It is was an actual microformat for addresses, that makes sense, but it's not. It's just a tag that implies that some kind of address (virtual, physical, who knows) is contained within. Who does this actually benefit?
"The ADDRESS element may be used by authors to supply contact information for a document or a major part of a document such as a form. This element often appears at the beginning or end of a document."
<address> is what people should have been using all along - I remember it was common in academic websites in the early-mid 90s, but it fell out of fashion. Similarly <em> for emphasis, the semantic meaning was lost when people switched to <b> and <i> instead.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 19.6 ms ] thread<address>, <q>, <optgroup>, <acronym> or <abbr>, <fieldset> and <legend>
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481067
It is was an actual microformat for addresses, that makes sense, but it's not. It's just a tag that implies that some kind of address (virtual, physical, who knows) is contained within. Who does this actually benefit?
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#edef-ADDRESS
"The ADDRESS element may be used by authors to supply contact information for a document or a major part of a document such as a form. This element often appears at the beginning or end of a document."
We should use the tag so that some yet-to-be-invented web spider might be able to automatically extract contact info for the pages it crawls?
Seems to be a very redundant article.