- From: Leons Petrazickis <leons.petrazickis@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2006 11:55:10 -0500
On 11/1/06, Anne van Kesteren <fora at annevankesteren.nl> wrote: > On Wed, 01 Nov 2006 20:55:58 +0100, James Graham <jg307 at cam.ac.uk> wrote: > >>> And HTML5 isn't that semantically pure anyway. > >> > >> Where can it be improved? > > > > To take a slight detour into the (hopefully not too) abstract, what do > > people think the fundamental point of semantics in HTML is? > > I've no idea. > > [snap] The fundamental point of semantics is to: - make document and application creation easier - make document and application maintenance easier - make documents and applications more parseable, readable, and reverse-engineerable When our notions of best semantics conflict with one of those three tenets, we need to step aside and reconsider our axioms, our architecture, our design, and our approach. HTML is a lot of things, and one of the main ones is HyperText Markup Language. We are marking up HyperText -- we are marking up the web. We need to mark up things that are on the web, that have appeared , that are coalescing, and that are just budding. We need to understand what the concepts are and where the natural boundaries lie, and create markup that matches natural boundaries. Natural boundaries are not always consistent -- we need to strive to match natural boundaries rather than to be consistent. Do people think in terms of articles? Then we need an article tag. Do people think in terms of comments? Then we need a comment tag? Do heading tags conceptually match post titles or entry tiles or comment titles? Maybe they do. Do we have a way of marking up authors, dates, times? Do we have a way of marking up "tags" and categories and "folksonomies"? If we don't, then maybe we should think of things in that regard, because free-form keyword categorization is a natural concept on the web. And natural concepts, boundaries are what matters. We shouldn't subdivide any more than people intuitively subdivide. Regards, -- Leons Petrazickis http://lpetr.org/
Received on Thursday, 2 November 2006 08:55:10 UTC