- From: David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>
- Date: Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:38:21 +0000
- To: www-style@w3.org
- CC: whatwg <whatwg@whatwg.org>
Ambrose LI wrote: > > I won’t exactly say DIV is non-structural. There are such things as > structural uses of DIV; it’s more correct to say it’s an HTML > container with undefined semantics (defined by conventions) and/or > undefined style (defined by stylesheets). > My understanding is that neither DIV nor SPAN were intended as purely presentational units. They were intended to allow the structure to be extended (by using classes) without having every possibly structure in the formal language, thus keeping HTML much simpler than, say, DocBook. It may well be that designers are using them without thinking about their structural meaning. I think one thing that could be done here is to compare this with tagged PDF. That starts from the point of view that presentation defines the structure of the document then tries to overlay it with semantics. Where form follows function, it interleaves the structural information, akin to the current CSS position. Where there is a conflict, e.g. page headings, it has a second data stream that describes how to group presentational units into semantic ones. That out of line approach is more like a CSS only approach. -- David Woolley Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want. RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam, that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.
Received on Saturday, 4 February 2012 14:40:02 UTC