HTML5
I was reading this article yesterday about html5 and WhatWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group). Pretty interesting stuff that I am actually excited for. So I started snooping around to see what other people are saying about it.
Some people think that we shouldn’t focus on anything new until we fix the current models. This means getting the browsers to be fully compliant with what we have and focusing on javascript and the dom to be on par with markup and style. Other people are saying that this will be a good thing for the semantic web, for more relevant search engine results, accessibility, and the future of web applications. I wouldn’t mind a more structured document that more clearly outlines my pages content. Of course, I can just use the classification system already in place:
<div class="article"></div>
The class attribute exists for other reasons than providing a css hook.
Isn’t this is a much more descriptive way of organizing your content though?
<article></article>
Using a class works fine, but is too easily misused or underused. I don’t have a set method each time I build a site yet. I am getting there slowly, but each site is different. Sometimes the class is called post, sometimes article, sometimes main_content. How can we then expect the semantic web to even know what we are talking about if even we don’t speak the same language all the time. And what about the developers who don’t speak English? Can we expect all screenreaders, or google, or whatever, to interpret every possible version of “article” exactly the same every time? Of course not.
If we had a guideline that all developers could follow then perhaps we wouldn’t need a new system. Microformats makes some headway towards this, but wouldn’t it be better in the long run if we had the markup we needed, instead of faking it with endless span and div tags? HTML is just as hard to read now as it was when it was nested table soup.
I am all for moving ahead even if there are some broken pieces. It is foolish to think that we can get them all fixed in the first place.
Comments
You bulletin about your blog and this is all I get? No drama?
IT’S NOT EVEN IN ENGLISH!