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

Tue Nov 13 02:11:48 PST 2012

By random chance, I just stumbled across this GitHub tool:
https://github.com/visualrevenue/reporter

It provides another heuristic approach - different from Scooby-Doo -  to
determining what is the main content on a page. This is from a journalist's
point of view and it is using a scoring and evaluation algorithm.

I'm sure a lot of other people had to solve this problem as well and have
done so in their own special way. Explicit author markup would make such a
task so much easier.

Regards,
Silvia.

On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 11:53 AM, Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com
> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 5:26 AM, Jens O. Meiert <jens at meiert.com> wrote:
>
>> Should <main> be optional or required?
>>
>
>> I’d deem an optional <main> to be nonsense because it suggests
>> documents are inherently without goal, or focus.
>>
>> I’d deem a required <main> to be nonsense because we already have an
>> (implied) <body> element, and because element proliferation doesn’t
>> work in anyone’s favor.
>>
>
> I can imagine it to become "required", if we mean by that that the
> browsers will need to parse a page and either find a <main> element or
> determine heuristically with the Scooby-Doo algorithm which part of the
> page is actually the main part and then add that to its DOM. Since we have
> the Scooby-Doo algorithm, we have a means to stay backwards compatible.
>
>
> That <body> essentially means <main> always seemed reasonable to me.
>> There are plenty of options for authors to add styling hooks if they
>> need any, including <div role=main>.
>
>
> You are correct - there is no need for this for styling. However, <main>
> is actually not for styling, but to provide a direct markup of the
> *semantically* main piece of content on the page. A Scooby-Doo algorithm
> can only heuristically determine what that is - with <main> the Web Dev
> gets an actual vehicle to point their finger explicitly rather than
> implicitly saying in a hand-wavy manner that it's what remains if you take
> away all this other stuff (that is: if we're lucky and that "other stuff"
> has actually been marked up).
>
> Silvia.
>