Comments on: HTML 5: The Section Element

By: blindgaenger

blindgaenger — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:42:30 +0000

Actually, this is an element I really missed. So in my opinion sections may become very useful. I totally agree, that using divs everywhere, would remove the semantic of HTML. It’s an application of XML, not the other way round.

By: TNO

TNO — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:11:40 +0000

@eyelidlessness
.
I was responding to mrclay’s issue with backwards compatibility. But since you brought it up, I have no issue with the semantics added by HTML5, but the fact remains that its based on current uses and which way the wind blows that will inevitably lead to migration tax further down the road (hence my referring to it as being evolutionary and not revolutionary like xml)

By: RyanGahl

RyanGahl — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:37:29 +0000

Almost seems like a fruitless labor for these uber dudes. HTML5 has been “in development” for about one million years now (literally). In the mean time, there is already RDF, microformats, etc… as well as great services like http://www.opencalais.com/

By the time HTML5 is out/adopted the world will have already made the move to other more powerful semantic engines. And no, there will never be just ONE.

Anyway, keep up the great work. Don’t think I’m not happy that HTML5 is being worked on, it’s just really NOT going to be a big deal, especially at the rate at which progress is being made.

By: eyelidlessness

eyelidlessness — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:06:05 +0000

@TNO: The purpose of a broader set of universal semantics is for interoperability. It is sensible to say “I want to get all

elements from this HTTP response”, while it is useless to say “I want to get all elements with classes like ‘section’, ‘psuedo-namespace-section’, ‘arbitrary-section-name’ and so on.”
.
The semantics added to HTML5 are important because they specify semantics for concepts in almost universal use with an almost endless list of semantic variation.

By: TNO

TNO — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 12:58:19 +0000

Issues like this are the reason xsl + xml was invented. Define your own syntax and your own semantics….

By: mrclay

mrclay — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:18:29 +0000

You forgot a pretty big part of the post: IE’s custom element support sucks in IE = unworkable back-compatibility = this probably isn’t going to work. Will this mean the end of all new block-level elements proposed or am I missing something?

By: eyelidlessness

eyelidlessness — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 18:13:16 +0000

Divs are semantically meaningless (by design). Sections are not.

If you’re asking why not use divs in place of semantically meaningful sections, the question then becomes “why not use only divs and spans?”

By: TNO

TNO — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:55:09 +0000

Because HTML 5 is evolutionary and not revolutionary…

By: jonhartmann

jonhartmann — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:58:07 +0000

Use of the new tags would carry greater meaning for the content then a div with a class. It would also unify how people use the tags. When we get sections, some one could use JS to query out all the sections from a page, where as now they would have to guess what class was used to define a section on that particular site, and hope that the creators used the same class for all sections.

By: theKryz

theKryz — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:45:49 +0000

Y not just use divs?