Bjartur Thorlacius wrote:
[quotation reorganized by me]
On 2/27/11, usuario <[email protected]> wrote:
Tiis may seem somewhat silly, every front-end developer have ever
used a a wrapper div, shouldn't it be more semantic to have a
wrapper element?
If said wrappers don't have any semantics but grouping loosely related
elements, for which no semantic container exists, div seems
appropriate.
I guess you mean a group that is not best describable as <nav> or <footer>
or <section> or some of the other semantic elements. The most obvious
candidate is the "content proper", as people often use, mainly for styling
purposes, grouping together any content that is not a header, a navigation
block, or a footer. In some cases, you might make it <article> or <section>,
but if those don't apply naturally, it should be <div>. It is better to be
semantically empty than to be semantically wrong, or even bordeline.
What semantics would such an wrapper element provide over <div>? I'd
rather discourage, and provide alternative features to wrapping.
Providing another element for that purpose goes against that.
Thinking purely logically (if we dare), <wrapper> would have the benefit of
explicitly saying "this is a wrapper for grouping, for no semantic reason",
thereby distinguishing it from <div> which may, and often does, involve
semantic or logical grouping. For example, <div id="footer"> is probably a
footer of some kind, not arbitrary grouping.
But thinking pragmatically, it is difficult to see strong reasons to
distinguishing wrappers from legacy use of <div>. Moreover, I don't think
people would use <wrapper> much, since they can use <div> and are accustomed
to <div>.
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
