[whatwg] A plea to Hixie to adopt <main>

Fri Nov 9 11:01:06 PST 2012

On 2012-11-07 23:41, Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Nov 2012, Ben Schwarz wrote:
>> What does concern me, as a web builder, *every day*, is how I markup the
>> content in-between a <header> and a <footer>.
> If you just want it for styling purposes, <div> is perfect.
>
>> <article>
>> <header>h1, h2, p</header>
>> <div class="content"></div>
>> <footer>time, a.permalink</footer>
>> </article>
> Exactly like that (or even without the class, if you just have one per
> article you can just do "article > div" to select it).
>

I've begun to do this a lot now, the less I have to use class= or id= 
for styling the better.
In one of my current projects I'm basically only using id= for actual 
anchor/indedx use, and no class= at all.
In fact except the few id= for index shortcuts the stylingin is all done 
in the .css and the only css referencve in the html document is the 
inclusion of the css link url.
I guess you could call it "stealth css" as looking at the html document 
does not reveal that css is used at all (except the css link in the html 
header)
I wish more webauthors would do this, makes for very clean html indeed.
Now back to the topic (sorry for getting sidetracked).

As to the <main> thing, the only time I'd ever be for adding that to 
HTML markup was if it would be specced per the following.

<main> and </main> encloses the content of a document, can be used in 
place of a <div> or <article> but can only occur once in a document.
If more than one instance of <main> and </main> block is encounctered, 
then parsers should only accept the first and ignore any others.
If no <main> then the content in the document itself is considered the 
main content.

Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't a <main> sort of be a synonym for 
<body> almost? *scratches head*

-- 
Roger "Rescator" Hågensen.
Freelancer - http://www.EmSai.net/