Comments on: Semantic HTML 5? Pfft.

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:39:37 +0000

The whole idea is bad, somehow the concept from XHTML2 was ignored, were you can have an additional attribute “role”, separated from the class and it’s association with the styling of the document.

(div class=”tbrdr2″ role=”Branding”) … (/div)

I still wish that HTML5 took more from XHTML2, which seems destined to be the great idea that has zero browser support, and were left with XHTML5 which seems to be just HTML5 with close tags.

By: blinds

blinds — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 15:22:02 +0000

oops, my markup dissappeared

so again:
bad markup:

header
h1
logo
SITE-title
/h1
/header

content

good markup:

h1 PAGE title /h1

content

branding logo /branding

By: blinds

blinds — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 15:18:56 +0000

I totally agree with Jonathan. What if you decide not put your logo on top of your content, but right or left of it? You could put your branding markup, where ever you want: Instead of doing stupid: you could do: page title Thanks Jonathan. I was furious and dissapointed about the W3C's HTML5 proposal, too, but too busy and angry to write about it. Thanks for pointing it out.

By: tedd

tedd — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 06:33:11 +0000

Hearing a different view is not giving up, but rather listening.

Cheers,

tedd

By: Jermayn Parker

Jermayn Parker — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:07:57 +0000

@Tedd – I dont mean a ‘fight’ I mean is he going to give up on his point of view so easily. Sorry its an Australian saying, so sorry for any misunderstanding.

By: tedd

tedd — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:06:25 +0000

It’s not a fight, but a discussion.

There’s no “right” answer, but answers that fit the needs.

Semantic means different things to different people.

By: Jermayn Parker

Jermayn Parker — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 23:30:35 +0000

You giving up without a fight Jonathan???

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:56:02 +0000

@Jermayn - It's a good point you make that markup re-usability be an important consideration. header and footer are two terms that are widely understood, so I realise I am playing the devils advocate by pointing out possible flaws with their semantic appropriateness. Judging from reader's comments I'm in the minority on this one - long live header and footer!

By: Jermayn Parker

Jermayn Parker — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 01:34:59 +0000

I personally think its a good idea having footer etc. While the Clarke idea is interesting, I think it fails in one area and that is if anyone has to rework your code. I hate having to read and rework other peoples code because of the confusing div naming and I think using branding etc is too confusing.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 01:51:05 +0000

@Tedd: I don’t think the proposed naming convention is necessarily bad – I certainly wouldn’t suggest my naming convention as an alternative! Like you say, my alternatives to header/footer make sense to me and the way I structure my pages, and wouldn’t necessarily be as meaningful to someone else.

(I didn’t actually make them up myself by the way – those are the names suggested by Andy Clarke in his book Transcending CSS)

What I find interesting is the to-and-fro of web design best practices. Andy Clarke and cohorts encourage us to make our markup semantic to the nth degree – advice I put to practice in my own work. While on the other hand the HTML 5 team seem to see no problem with describing content based on visual appearance (where it is likely to appear on the page).

I am curious to know if the new HTML elements will have a formatting bias as well. Will the new elements (header, footer, section, nav, aside) have some sort of default styles applied to them – will an aside be floated right, for instance, or will text in the footer be smaller than regular body copy?