Re: HTML5 feedback from prominent designers

Aryeh Gregor On 09-09-06 19.27:

> On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
>> The advantage of a <sidebar> element would eventually be that it became more
>> simple for authors to create e.g. 3 column web pages. And I thought such
>> simplifications was one of the goals of HTML 5.
> 
> That's purely a CSS issue.  It isn't affected by whether you use
> <aside> or <sidebar> or <div class="sidebar">; all three are equally
> easy to select, give or take a character or two.


Lachlan also saw this in the light of a <content> element. 
<sidebar> would be like a <notcontent> element, kind of.

I would not be opposed to 'sidebar'. If we have an <aside> 
element, and if <aside> is easy to mix with the concept of 
sidebar, then the adding of a <sidebar> element would make it 
clear that <aside> and <sidebar> are different things.

I disagree with you if you see 'sidebar' and 'aside' as just a 
styling issue. Or - rather - if an 'aside' is as (un)related to an 
article as a sidebar can be, then I don't see that we need 'aside' 
- whichever name we give it.

>> Compare with HTML 4: It has "div" (even English speakers doesn't know that
>> it means "division"), "p", "a". Just to mention 3 element names that are too
>> short to know what they mean. I think it makes perfect sense for an
>> international language like HTML to use element names that can be pronounced
>> "natively" in almost any language of the world! ;-)
>>
>> What do we see in HTML 5? Answer: "article', 'section', 'aside' etc.  These
>> full length names represent an anglification of the element names HTML.
> 
>>From HTML 4: <acronym>, <address>, <applet>, <area>, <base>,
> <basefont>, <big>, <blockquote>, <body>, <button>, <caption>,
> <center>, <cite>, <code>, <fieldset>, <font>, <form>, <frameset>,
> <head>, <input>, <isindex>, <label>, <legend>, <link>, <map>, <menu>,
> <noframes>, <noscript>, <object>, <option>, <script>, <select>,
> <small>, <span>, <strike>, <strong>, <style>, <table>, <textarea>,
> <title>.
> 
> In any event, I don't think there's any value in making things equally
> incomprehensible to speakers of all languages.

All agree that abbreviations are faster to type. I pointed out 
another advantage to using abbreviations. Many of the elements in 
HTML 4 have fairly "international" names, or are abbreviations. 
Looking at that list of names, I have no problems repeating it. 
But you are free to disagree.

This may be personal (there are of course many non-English that 
will jump and say they have no problems with it), but I really 
feel that 'legend' is a bad name because it gives non-English very 
few associations. ('label' is then better - it is even reflected 
by ARIA's labelledby etc.) That is one additional reason for why I 
prefer not to have a 'legend' element inside 'figure'.

However, I think we were discussing <aside>. It would be 
interesting to hear more views on the idea of using <figure> as 
container for aside content. I think that for those cases wehre 
the aside can not be represented by a <figure>, then <article> and 
<section> can just as well be used - for instance.
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Sunday, 6 September 2009 17:52:38 UTC