Re: The History of <aside> for sidebars

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 3:08 PM, John Foliot<jfoliot@stanford.edu> wrote:
> Meanwhile, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>> Blogrolls and archive links are often on the sidebar, true, but I
>> think that's mostly a pure style issue - they are usually tall and
>> display well with a constrained width, which makes them fit much
>> better in a sidebar than a header.
>
> (JF wonders how "tall" and "constrained width" affects the non-sighted
> user... )
>
> Not that the point is not taken, but structure is more than just display.

Certainly!  That was my argument, in fact - that the differences
between <header>/<footer>/<aside> are purely visual when used as page
structure.  They share virtually identical "content models" (taking a
colloquial definition of such, rather than the spec definition), with
the only differences being based on visual styling (like blogrolls
visually displaying best in a sidebar).

Structure-wise, they're all just <ui>.  The only reason they have
different names is because those are the classes we give <div>s
filling those roles to define their visual display, and classnames
were the big determiner of what new elements to add in this realm.

~TJ