- From: Robin Berjon <robin@berjon.com>
- Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2009 17:47:19 +0100
- To: Justin Anthony Knapp <justinkoavf@gmail.com>
- Cc: public-html@w3.org
On Jan 6, 2009, at 14:13 , Justin Anthony Knapp wrote: > I figured this might be of interest: > > http://www.alistapart.com/articles/semanticsinhtml5 I already posted my comment there, but since discussing things in article comments is easily one of the most annoying facets of today's Web I'll repost it here for farts old and young like myself who prefer email. """ John, you make an interesting case, yet as the comments — no matter how smart they may be too — clearly show, you fall into a common trap: you propose a solution to an unclear problem. Pretty much everyone in the Web community agrees that “semantics are yummy, and will get you cookies”, and that’s probably true. But once you start digging a little bit further, it becomes clear that very few people can actually articulate a reason why. So before we all go another round on this, I have to ask: what’s it you wanna do with them darn semantics? The general answer is “to repurpose content”. That’s fine on the surface, but you quickly reach a point where you have to ask “repurpose to what?”. For instance, if you want to render pages to a small screen (a form of repurposing) then <nav> or <footer> tell you that those bits aren’t content, and can be folded away; but if you’re looking into legal issues digging inside <footer> with some heuristics won’t help much. I think HTML5 should add only elements that either expose functionality that would be pretty much meaningless otherwise (e.g. <canvas>) or that provide semantics that help repurpose *for Web browsing uses*. We can debate the specifics, but seen in this light the existing additions to HTML5 pretty much make sense. This is very definitely not to say that there shouldn’t be extensibility hooks, rather I aim to indicate which extensibility approach should go where. That also tells you why looking at DocBook isn’t such a great idea. DocBook is for technical documentation, HTML is far more general in its purpose. DocBook has hundreds of elements and attributes that would make no sense in HTML. So before we look into other ways of including semantics in HTML, we need to look at use cases. Want to extract some triples? Maybe GRDDL can cut it. Want to do semantic decoration of your tree? Looking into RDFa could perhaps be an option. Want to have your content stick as cleanly as possible to the semantics of your model, and render that separately? It could be a job for arbitrary XML with some XBL (we’re talking 2020 here). I really am not the use case fascist most of the time, but when the word “semantics” comes up it helps to reach for the bullwhip. """ -- Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ Feel like hiring me? Go to http://robineko.com/
Received on Tuesday, 6 January 2009 16:47:59 UTC