Re: Proposal: <content> element

Ian Hickson wrote:

>> <section> (or other sectioning element)
>>   <header/>
>>   <content/>
>>   <footer/>
>> </section>
> 
> Purely to prevent other elements from being abused, I could buy doing 
> this... I dunno, though, it seems a bit silly. I'd rather wait to see if 
> we can evangelise the right markup some more before giving up.

A noticeably high fraction of people looking for feedback on their HTML 
5 markup on #whatwg have asked which element they should be using for 
their main content, often thinking they are supposed to use either 
<section> or <article> when in fact they are looking for <div>. Although 
this is clearly anecdotal, it suggests that misuse of sectioning 
elements is going to be a significant problem with wider adoption. Since 
evangelism  generally has a rather high cost and limited payoff I think 
introducing a new element upfront makes the most sense even without 
considering the additional benefits such as improved source readability 
over <div>-based solutions.

Received on Friday, 28 August 2009 08:15:26 UTC