On 2013-09-16 18:22, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

[citation needed]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_HTML

On the contrary, from what I've read in LaTeX and typography is that you
want to keep formatting semantics high level, e.g. "This is a chapter
title" as opposed to "this is heading text" or (worse) "this is large
text with large spacing".

This is not LaTeX. When using the proper tags you're adding semantic meaning to your content. Example, a proper table with an header and footer should look like this:

<table>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th>Header</th>
      <th>Header 2</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>

  <tfoot>
    <tr>
      <td>Footer data</th>
      <td>Footer data 2</th>
    </tr>
  </tfoot>

  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>Data</td>
      <td>Data 2</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

The reason for adding proper tags like "thead", "tfoot" and "tbody" is it gives semantic meaning to the content. A browser can choose to scroll the content in "tbody" while having the content in "thead" and "tfoot".

The same idea can be applied to navigation as well. Using the "nav" tag a browser could probably choose to scroll the main content and but not the content of the "nav" tag.

It is, but it seems to me the more specific "list of symbols introduced"
is better.

Then you add a class in addition to the correct tag.

In this case the distinction is actually material because we have one
style file for both Phobos and the larger dlang.org, and we may want to
format regular <dd> differently from Phobos symbols description. This
seems to be a Good Thing (tm).

Then you use different classes, but still uses the correct tag.

Another example. If you want to emphasis text one uses the "em" tag, not the "i" tag. The it's up to the style sheet (CSS) to decide if the emphasized text should be italic, bold or some other font.

It's the same thing why one should use the type "bool" (D, C++) instead of "int". It gives the correct semantic meaning.

Actually as I noted above that's an issue because we share the same
style file between dlang.org and phobos. Of course, we could have two
files, but I don't find using classes a shameful alternative.

We most likely should.

--
/Jacob Carlborg

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