[whatwg] "content" element, which we need in our documents

[Ashley Sheridan]

Ian Yang <ian.html at gmail.com> wrote:

>Hi editors in chief and everyone else,
>
>How have you been recently?
>
>As many of you may have been aware that there is an important
>sectioning
>element we have been short of for a long time: the "content" element.
>
>Remember how we sectioned our documents in those old days? It's the
>meaningless <div>s. We used them and added id="header", id="content",
>id="sidebar", and id="footer" to them.
>
>After HTML5 came out, we started to have new and semantic elements like
>"header", "aside", and "footer" to improve our documents.
>
>However, today, we are still using the meaningless <div> for our
>content.
>
>The main content forms an important region. And we often wrap it with
>an
>element. By doing so, we distinguish the region from the header and the
>footer, and also prevent all of its child elements (block level or
>inline
>level) being incorrectly at the same level as the header and the
>footer.
>
>In the first example of the intro section of the nav element in HTML5
>Spec
>( http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/single-page.html#the-nav-element ) (the
>page
>takes a while to be fully loaded), the bottom note states: "Notice the
>div
>elements being used to wrap all the contents of the page other than the
>header and footer, and all the contents of the blog entry other than
>its
>header and footer."
>
>This example mentioned above is a typical situation that we need an
>element
>for the main content. So instead of keep wrapping our contents with the
>meaningless <div>, why not let the "content" element join HTML5?
>
>
>Sincerely,
>Ian Yang
>Meaningful and semantic HTML lover  |  Front-end developer

I am pretty sure this was discussed a few months back and the answer was that everything is content, so no need for a content element. The <header> and <footer> just mark up areas of that content with special meaning, but its still all the main content.

Thanks,
Ash
http://ashleysheridan.co.uk