[html5] What is the point about nav, header, footer and aside elements?

Prof. T.D. Wilson wilsontd at gmail.com
Wed Nov 28 07:23:01 PST 2012


On 28 November 2012 15:22, Prof. T.D. Wilson <wilsontd at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just a small point - these aren't "semantic", they are simply (as you
> note) layout tags - they say nothing about the meaning of what is between
> the tags and there is no connection between tag and content other than to
> indicate where the content is to be found - at the head of a page, or the
> foot of the page, etc. A "semantic" tag would have to say what the content
> is about, and I can't imagine any such tags being developed any time soon
> :-)
>
> On 28 November 2012 09:19, Markus Ernst <derernst at gmx.ch> wrote:
>
>> Hello
>>
>> I try to follow the discussion on the main element in the WHATWG list. I
>> don't want to bloat that discussion with my dummy question, so I post it
>> here in the Help list - feel free to ignore it if you think this has been
>> discussed enough before; this is no trolling attempt however (I actually
>> tried to find the old discussions, but the list archive search does not
>> seem to find any matches for "nav" or "aside" right now).
>>
>> The longer the main element is discussed, the more I ask myself what is
>> actually the point in all the new semantic elements such as nav, header,
>> footer and aside. Would it not be much easier to solve this via an
>> attribute?
>> <ul role="navigation">...</ul>
>> seems to be simpler to me than:
>> <nav><ul>...</ul></nav>
>>
>> And the former would even be better with regard to BC compatibility (at
>> least I assume that a CSS selector "ul[role=navigation]" has better support
>> in legacy browsers than the selector "nav ul").
>>
>> Trying to understand the ARIA roles, I see that this model is indeed too
>> sophisticated to be adopted by the majority of authors. But this could be
>> worked around easily in 2 ways:
>> - Introduce a global attribute @role to the HTML spec, and suggest the
>> ARIA roles to be used as values for navigation, header, footer and aside
>> type content (which would reduce the discussion on main to it being
>> mentioned in the HTML spec or not as a suggested value of @role)
>> - Introduce a new global attribute with a set of values for those types
>> of content
>>
>> OTOH, introducing hav, header, footer and aside elements adds complexity
>> to the document structure by inserting elements that have the sole purpose
>> of telling the UA what kind of contents they have inside. If this is no
>> problem - then I don't see why it is such a hard discussion on adding the
>> main element, too.
>> ______________________________**_________________
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Professor T.D. Wilson, PhD, Hed.Dr, PhD (h.c.)
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Publisher and Editor in Chief: Information Research:
> an international electronic journal
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>
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>


-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Professor T.D. Wilson, PhD, Hed.Dr, PhD (h.c.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Publisher and Editor in Chief: Information Research:
an international electronic journal
Website - http://InformationR.net/ir/ <http://informationr.net/ir/>

Blog - http://info-research.blogspot.com/
Photoblog - http://tomwilson.shutterchance.com/
----------------------------------------------------------------------|
E-mail: wilsontd at gmail.com
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