Re: HTML5 feedback from prominent designers

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 2:22 AM, James Graham<jgraham@opera.com> wrote:
> Hmm, possibly I'm weird because there is no way that I get from the term
> "aside" to "sidebar". I would really be interested to know how you make that
> connection because (apart from the obvious fact that "side" is a substring
> of both words) I honestly don't see it. Indeed I assumed for a long time
> that <aisde> mean "pullout" rather than "sidebar" even though I must have
> been involved with discussions where it was mentioned that it could be used
> for a sidebar.

They both contain the word "side" and a sidebar is placed "aside" the
main content (not really modern english, but still comprehensible).
That's how I got there initially, at least.

> I am still unconvinced the semantic or UA-behaviour overlap between the two
> cases (sidebar vs pullout) is great enough that a single element for both
> makes sense.
On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 6:22 AM, Jonas Sicking<jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
> Agreed. One thing that I'm wondering is if sidebars aren't really
> <header>s, from a semantic point of view. Looking at wikipedia for
> example, it seems like the sidebar is basically just a <header> laid
> out to the side.

Indeed, there's rarely a significant difference between content in the
header, footer, or sidebar.  They're all just areas surrounding the
content that contain miscellaneous other stuff.  It's difficult to
find things that would definitely go in one of the three areas, but
not any of the others (exception - page title, which obviously goes in
the header).  Most things would go in all three just fine.

>From a semantic point of view these are all <ui> or <structure>.  They
are analogous with similar constructions used within articles, but I
don't know if this analogy is always going to be clear.

~TJ

Received on Friday, 4 September 2009 14:08:41 UTC