[whatwg] <CENTER>, <MENU>, <DIR>, <NL>

[Lachlan Hunt]

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.  Authors should not use
presentational markup, regardless of how much easier it seems.  In fact,
the easier method is to increase the amount of semantics, increase you
knowledge of and skills with selectors so you don't have to use a class
for everything, and style based on the elements semantics.

> I believe that they are useful for visual user agents, in that we don't 
> have to provide a class name for simple uses. Generally speaking, 
> <CENTER> should be used sparingly, if at all, but it should be used. 
> <CENTER> could be used for resume headings and various other types of 
> text, like peotry.

What's wrong with:

<h1>Resume</h1>

h1 { text-align: center; }

> I'd like to recommend that the WHATWG bring back <MENU> & <DIR>,

Menu is already coming back, there's a whole section devoted to it.  I
don't see any use for dir.

> I'd like to recommend that the WHATWG standardize <NL>. I suggest this 
> because <NL> is shorter than <NAV> and because <NL> is consistent with 
> XHTML. As I typed the previous sentence, I noticed that <NL> is much 
> easier to type with 1 hand, than <NAV>.

Actually, nl is much more like menu than nav and while consistency is
good in many cases, nl and nav serve different purposes and giving them
the same name would only cause confusion.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/