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

Wed Nov 14 07:11:43 PST 2012

Steve,

> 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.

I am aware of that, but the point I was making was in regard to Silvia's
email about the github visualreference tool that she found.

>From a non-UA standpoint, such as crawling service for a search
engine, heuristics
would still be needed to accurately identify primary content.

So when Silvia said:

> 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.

I was disagreeing with that point because there's no way to implicitly
trust the author, in the same way that search engines can't trust <meta
name="keywords" />

I probably should have made that all explicit to begin with,
☺

☺

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 6:01 AM, Steve Faulkner <faulkner.steve at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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>
>