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

Wed Nov 14 03:01:41 PST 2012

Hi *Tim*,

> I was just trying to make the point that an algorithmic approach to
finding
> the main content of a document would still be necessary with or without
the
> <main> element.

The same can be said for any of the structural semantic elements, what we
know is that some authors mark up headings, nav, footer, articles etc
incorrectly or not at all.

What we also know is that user agents do not generally implement heuristics
to provide semantic information to users, they rely upon explicit markup to
expose semantic structures to convey meaning and provide navigation of
content.

For example, ARIA landmark roles are now supported in most browsers and
assistive technology and used by browsers for built in mapping of roles for
new HTML structural elements that do not have platform accessibility API
specific roles (most do not).

regards
SteveF

> > > Hope you're not just trolling
> >
> > I was just trying to make the point that an algorithmic approach to
> finding
> > the main content of a document would still be necessary with or without
> the
> > <main> element.
> >
> > ☺
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 7:03 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer
> > <silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com>wrote:
> >
> > > On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 4:25 AM, Tim Leverett <zzzzbov at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > >
> > >> > Explicit author markup would make such a task so much easier.
> > >>
> > >> Only if every author marked up their code correctly. If some authors
> use
> > >> incorrect markup, then an algorithm would still be necessary for
> > >> determining if each usage was correct.
> > >>
> > >
> > > Hope you're not just trolling.
> > >
> > > From a browser perspective, if there is one <main> element and it sits
> > > within <body>, that would be sufficiently correct.
> > >
> > > Whether it's semantically correct for a particular application, that's
> not
> > > something the HTML spec should or could deal with. We don't protect
> people
> > > from putting the wrong text in tags - not in microdata, not in
> <article> or
> > > anywhere else. An application may care - or they may trust the author
> and
> > > if the author cares enough, they will fix up their markup if it doesn't
> > > achieve the right goal.
> > >
> > > But I'm sure you were just trolling... ;-)
> > >
> > > Cheers,
> > > Silvia.
> > >
>

 <http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat-ie-about.html>