Re: [html] Semantics of "aside", "header", and "footer"

On Sep 6, 2007, at 10:03 AM, Jens Meiert wrote:

>
> (Apologies for recent WG discussion and collaboration absence; I  
> moved.)
>
> I need to bring up the "aside" [1], "header" [2], and "footer" [3]  
> elements again, no matter that they've been discussed a few times  
> yet. I'm still not convinced that their names are very appropriate  
> as they seem to be too "presentational" and almost meaningless.

I disagree that they are presentational. Headers, footers and asides  
are identifiable parts of web documents and indeed non-web documents  
just as much as paragraphs and sections are. Furthermore, it is hard  
to see how they are any more presentational than <tfoot>, <thead>,  
<h1> or <th>.

Regards,
Maciej

> I'm very interested in how you judge that and whether more WG  
> members see those as an issue, and beside asking for your pick, I  
> may illustrate the problem by at the same time proposing alternate  
> names and slightly different/complementary semantics like:
>
> * "auxiliary"/"aux" or "supplement" instead of "aside"; quite more  
> generic and probably the most debatable suggestions here, but also  
> less related to the element's presentation.
>
> * "identity" instead of "header"; I know that more people gripe when  
> it comes to "header" and "footer" (yet with IDs and classes of the  
> same names which seems reasonable to me), and observing people who  
> look for alternatives and also doing a "heuristic analysis" of  
> current use, "identity" seems to be a descriptive and in many cases  
> sufficient alternative for "header".
>
> * "about" instead of "footer"; again, it's just a hasty suggestion,  
> but the situation is similar to "header", and "about" already  
> appears to be an improvement, too.
>
>
> Regards,
> Jens.
>
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#aside
> [2] http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#header
> [3] http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#footer
>
> -- 
> Jens Meiert
> http://meiert.com/en/
>
>

Received on Thursday, 6 September 2007 22:44:16 UTC