
Writing W3C spec and smoking crack are not mutually exclusive activities - dan_sim
http://24ways.org/2009/incite-a-riot
======
daleharvey
I honestly never understood why html needs to manually specify all these tags,
due to the contraints their semantics are as much as lost, just give us some
tags with clear and precise semantics list, quote, address, a, input etc, then
let us markup the rest with whatever we want.

~~~
jerf
The more clearly you specify the semantics, the less applicable the tag is, by
necessity.

Personally, I've come around to the idea that semantic HTML is a joke, because
"semantics" can only exist in the context of an agreed-upon semantic _context_
and there's absolutely no way to declare One True Semantic Context, handed
down from a committee. There's nothing more or less "semantic" about <cite>
vs. <div class="cite">; both may be meaningless, or one may be meaningful but
not the other, or both may mean subtly different things, all depending on the
context they are in. Nor does wrapping something in a non-existant tag <book>
magically make it "non-semantic" _or_ "semantic", until a context is (or is
not) added. There's no magic in the tag name; it's just a meaningless string
by itself.

Bear in mind that much of the reason I say that the centralized committee
can't hand down the One True Context is that even if they _do_ , it is simply
a fact that vast swathes of the web will ignore their dictate, and a world in
which only 10% of the uses of the "cite" tag are actually "semantically
correct" is a world in which the putative semantics are useless. (And if you
say "Well, we'll cut it down to a certain subset, like my personal store of
documents.", my response is, yes, yes you will, and that's exactly what I mean
by a "semantic context".) (And 10% is probably a gross, orders-of-magnitude
overestimate.)

Context-free semantics is a contradiction in terms.

~~~
daleharvey
One true semantic context is of course a pipe dream, theres 2 reasons I would
like to be able to define whatever tag I want.

1\. My markup is cleaner, <contextmenu> vs <div id="contextmenu">, this has
implications on my javascript and css (both in terms of speed and cleanliness)

2\. API and "microformats" are trivialised, this is of course also dependant
on producing parseable (x)html (another decision I really dont understand)

but why on earth is

[http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.people.ge...](http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.people.getPublicPhotos&api_key=d6c998c73b6ba60e7b31b83618909afe&user_id=69845378%40N00)

different from

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/daleharvey>

they really dont need to be

~~~
jerf
Yes, as a direct consequence of the fact that I don't believe in One True
Context, I think the proper solution to HTML 5 is to say "Look, tags can be
anything, here's enough CSS to style your arbitrary tags" (which we pretty
much have, CSS 3 removed the last browser-only magic by letting you futz with
tables), and everything else should be a separate standard.

That said, I think this approach even sort of mostly _works_ already, albeit
with some pain and some JS hackery required. I just want it in the standard.
And if we were doing that, I would ask for some events around tags, so I could
in the <head> register a "tag creation" listener for, say, <calendar>, and so
when that tag is encountered, use JS to populate it with stuff the browser
understands.

Alas, I am not the standard maker.

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mkelly
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the author's point, but I thought there
was a push to move away from lots of special-case tags like <q>, <dl>, etc.
For such a general-purpose SGML, it seems silly to assume that HTML will have
a semantically-meaningful tag for the majority of your semantics.

Maybe I'm smoking crack, though. :)

~~~
windsurfer
But they still define them. Either keep them or toss them, but don't just half
heartedly try.

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ThinkWriteMute
I pretty much use div and span with ID and CLASS to achieve what I want.

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jacoblyles
I'm hoping this title is literal, as in "smoking crack and being the mayor of
DC are not mutually exclusive activities"

edit: No, the title is false advertising.

