Comments on: Taking semantic tags one step further

By: Jamie

Jamie — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 20:28:02 +0000

In many situations, it is simpler to just use classes and IDs on existing semantic elements. An element like “twitter” wouldn’t be used nearly as often as the existing “header” tag, and even has the potential (however small) to eventually become obsolete. Because of this, dedicating time to documenting and supporting arbitrary elements would be quite inefficient.

By: John Darling

John Darling — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:51:23 +0000

Very cool idea! I am dabbling with html5 these days and I love the more semantic tags as opposed to divitus (use of divs, ids and classes). Not validating concerns me a little. As for the lack of support for browsers not using js, well thats going to be an issue for any html5 site that is viewed on a non-supporting html5 browser not running js…whoa that was a kind of a tongue twister lol (e.g. early IE).

Anyway this is the first post i’ve read here, and i will be sure to stay tuned for more.

Sick stuff! :p

By: Radu Chelariu

Radu Chelariu — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 06:08:56 +0000

@meilinPR: I do agree with you that single-occurence elements could be left to the HTML standards, but let’s consider an example – a car parts manufacturer. In this example, a page may display 10 exhaust pipes, 10 gear shifters, 10 transmissions etc. In this case, perhaps using super-semantic tags isn’t a bad idea. Still, super semantic tags are obviously experimental and not a go-to fix. It’s a radical idea that will, probably, never leave the confines of this website. But they’re still damn cool!
Thanks for the layout pointers, it seems they came just in time, as we’re in the middle of a code overhaul on the website. We’ll through your thoughts into the pot and see what comes out

By: meilinPR

meilinPR — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 05:07:50 +0000

Using instead of

does look much cleaner, but I question its usefulness. This would only be good for structural code that is not likely to be taken out of context (unless, say, , which might be read by an RSS reader), but these are tags are not recurrent – that is, not every site needs a container div, and those that do use it will only have one. So, then, why add tags (such as container and sidebar)? And I am always reluctant to use JavaScript.

Since I am posting, let me say that this is a very nice layout, it’s a while since I’ve seen one like this one (with the holder for the sidebar drawn in the background). But something strange happened. When I was reading the articles on CSS formatting and on KISS, the content went below the sidebar. A case of the container not being wide enough for the two block elements to be side-by-side, I figured, but then I maximized my window (my res is 1400px wide), and it still didn’t look right. Everything is suddenly magically fixed, though, as long as I keep the window no narrower than 1000px.

By the way, this comment box drives me crazy. Because I don’t know whether I can use HTML, and what tags can use, nor is there a ‘Preview’ button.

By: mansour

mansour — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:06:05 +0000

this is the sickness.

By: Radu Chelariu

Radu Chelariu — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:48:12 +0000

@Victor: Thanks! While building the new sickdesigner.com I too was a bit weary about not being able to validate; to be honest I’m not sure this problem will ever be solved. The way I see it you can overcome this by first creating the website with divs with ids and validating as you would normally and then at the very end replace these with super semantic tags. That way, the code is proper, even though not valid.
@Ian: it’s true, the code is dependant on Javascript and while disabled you’d run into what I can only imagine as paranormal behavior from older browsers, while the newer class of browsers might be able to cope with the new tags.
This is all very experimental and while sickdesigner.com is built using this technique, I can live with it because 98% of my visitors have Javascript on and about 90 something procent use modern browsers. So for me, it’s all safe and sound; it depends on your audience.

By: Victor Bauer

Victor Bauer — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:39:44 +0000

Excellent post! Congratulations!
the only thing i’m preocupado is the W3C validation…
The “document.createElement” solves the problem with the browsers and CSS styles. But the HTML code isn’t validated. How can we solve this?
Thanks

By: Ian Storm Taylor

Ian Storm Taylor — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:43:18 +0000

This is a very interesting idea indeed.

One thing that leaves me weary is that its all based on Javascript. What happens when users have this feature disabled?

By: Edward

Edward — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:41:11 +0000

Very cool – I’ve been wondering why we use divs and classes for awhile now.. this XML-type HTML is our future

By: Ricu

Ricu — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:32:04 +0000

These are very good points and it makes the code much much cleaner and easy to modify. Unfortunately you said it yourself : “clients don’t care about the latest and greatest, they care about revenue and WYSIWYG (most have never heard of graceful degradation/progressive enhancement)”

Until they can be user people need to be educated to upgrade their browsers so that developers and designer can use the new tricks , and clients need to help us more.

The development of the web resistance is made from people that don’t bother, and i am sad to say we cannot be like them that is why IE6 still roams the web like the ghost that it is.

PS : This was a post just to kill the no comments monster ! damn monsters they took ‘r jobs !