[whatwg] Giving the <body> tag a new meaning.

Tue Mar 1 14:48:58 PST 2011

On 3/1/11, usuario <soyhobo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Let me put it in others words. Following the last example.
>
> Here is the way i see it,
> Everything inside a word document IS CONTENT (not body). In that document we
> may have or not a header, or a footer, but we always "should" have a body,
> in this word document, for convenience purposes text by default is intended
> to be body (hence no need to mark it as that).
>
I neither write nor speak English natively, but I believe that the
body element has to
be preserved all but as it is, if only for compatibility. Instead, you
should propose
putting the main content inside another element inside the body element, say
<content>. Alternatively, you could try using <article>, but <article>
has further
semantics, and is thus unsuitable for wrapping the main content of an
index (that is
an index). IMO, HTML isn't a good format for indexes, but that's
probably only IMO.

> In HTML, as you say, everything by default is body (about the same a a word
> document). But the thing is that in HTML5, WE ARE making distinctions among
> *header* and *footer* content. My only counter here is why aren't we making
> distinctions of body content too?
>
> Is this semantic to you?
> <body>
>     <header></header>
>     <footer></footer>
> </body>
> There is an obvious (may be not dangerous) semantic issue there. Why in the
> world a footer can be inside a body, aren't they siblings of a document?
>
> To me (but hope you too), something semantic would be this:
> <content>
>     <header></header>
>     <body></body>
>     <footer></footer>
> </content>
>
> I've been requested to solve a problem. Former has never been a problem, web
> as worked well in that way. I just am setting out a new way of thinking
> about html. Being more declarative.
>
As previously stated, we can't change the semantics an content model of <body>.
OTOH, it may be possible to put information that may be presented as a
footer in
<head>. <Head> poses strict constraints on both descendant nodes and position
in the document (it must come first).
 It may thus be more suitable to specify a new element positioned
_after_ </body>
containing information that belongs neither to head nor body. This
would probably
replace <aside>, which IMO has no place in body which is intended to be loosely
linear. Also, I think that most information that's rendered in a
footer should be
marked up in the head, or as more general metadata fields such as RFC 2822
headers or file xattrs. Headers seem to consist mostly of navigational
links, more
appropriately marked up with <link>s.