On 14 Jan, 2006, at 1:24 PM, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
Eugene T.S. Wong wrote:
I'd like to recommend that the WHATWG bring back <CENTER> because it
provides an excellent way of saying "this is a centered <DIV>".
<DIV> is no more semantic that <I>, <B>, or <CENTER>, yet they have
their uses.
No, center is presentational, div is not.
<div> is presentational: it means "present this as a block". That is
what it will mean in HTML 5 documents as well, regardless of how it is
eventually defined in the specification, because author momentum will
be too great to usefully narrow its meaning. And that's okay: there is
no evidence that any deity kills a kitten when someone uses <div>.
Authors should not use presentational markup, regardless of how much
easier it seems.
...
Authors should use presentational markup whenever there is no available
semantic markup for the relevant meaning, or when they are providing
authoring facilities for people who cannot be expected to think about
semantic markup (e.g. people using Webmail, or people posting comments
on the author's Weblog). If authors -- or specifications -- try too
hard to use a semantic element, or to force other people to use it, it
will be misused so much that UAs can no longer trust the element to
have any particular meaning, so it will become de facto presentational.
The semantics of an element come partly from its specification, and
mostly from the people who use it. If the current definitions of
elements in the Web Applications 1.0 draft remain as they are, and HTML
5 becomes widely used, HTML 5 documents will feature nine
presentational elements.
<div>
This was defined in HTML 3.0 and 3.2 to mean about the same as
<section> means in Web Applications 1.0, but was soon repurposed by
Web authors for any block for which the author could not think of a
better element. It will continue to be used that way in HTML 5,
because even if replacement elements like <cartoonpanel>, <login>,
<nav>, <order>, <search>, <sidebar>, <signup>, and <sudokupuzzle>
were introduced in an attempt to narrow the use of <div>, authors
would hardly ever bother using such specialized elements, since
they'd get no benefit from doing so. (But <aside> and <menu> will
reduce the use of <div> by a small amount, because they have
distinct and useful default presentations.)
<dl>, <dt>, <dd>
These elements were semantic until HTML 4.0, which belied their
supposed meaning both in an example in the spec, and in the markup
of the spec itself. They remain presentational in the current Web
Applications 1.0 draft, because use for both "terms and
definitions" and "name-value data" is still too broad to have a
coherent meaning. (For example, from the markup alone, a search
engine will not be able to tell whether "Ian Hickson, Google,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]" is the answer to "Who is the editor of Web
Applications 1.0?", or a definition of the word "editor" itself.)
<i>
This has always been presentational, and will continue to be so in
the majority of HTML 5 documents. Most authors will assume it has
the same purpose as it did in previous versions of HTML; and many
of the authors who actually read that part of the spec will giggle
at the "instance of a term" frippery and disregard it.
<p>
This has been semantic until now, meaning a paragraph. But the
current Web Applications 1.0 draft pretends that the English word
"paragraph" means something much broader than it really does, so
broad that it will have no semantics at all. (For example, someone
instructed to write a ten-paragraph essay will get incorrect
results from a paragraph count if, as suggested by Web Apps 1.0,
they use <p> for the essay's byline.) As a result, <p> will come to
mean "present this as a block with extra vertical margins".
<section>
This is semantic in the Web Apps 1.0 draft, but whether it remains
so in the real world will depend on who is faster: UA vendors
distributing software that prominently takes advantage of the
structure <section> is supposed to provide, or eager tech Weblog
authors misguidedly replacing all the occurrences of <div> with
<section> in their templates in an attempt to be "more semantic".
My money, regretfully, is on the Weblog authors.
<strong> or <b>
If <b> is retained, it will remain a presentational element for
making text bold ad hoc, regardless of how the spec defines it. If
<b> is dropped, <strong> will become a de facto presentational
element for making text bold ad hoc, regardless of how the spec
defines it. (To a small extent this has already happened, thanks to
those people who have given the impression that <b> is naughty.)
<style>
This has always been presentational; it exists for no other reason
than to specify presentation.
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
