Professional web developers don't have time to create elaborate abstractions for the sake of making their code "semantic" and easily understood by visitors reading their website's source.
Websites are ultimately for the user agent. "Semantic" HTML and CSS were never really so. They were guidelines to create code that was way more abstract than necessary and smuggled in a lot of terminology and concepts from print media, all of which were somewhat important before there were things like Firebug and proper dev tools.
Semantic html isn't important for visitors reading the source code but for web crawlers, seo and for accessibility.
> They were guidelines to create code that was way more abstract than necessary and smuggled in a lot of terminology and concepts from print media
This is historically very wrong. Also, printing of html documents is still one of its major uses (e.g. any time you download a pdf of a ticket you buy).
I'm honestly baffled at how little care there is for well written html.
If you don't care about your applications being html, don't bother putting them into browsers at all, just go native.
Or if you really need the browser base, put everything in a canvas, why bother with xml?
> Professional web developers don't have time to create elaborate abstractions for the sake of making their code "semantic"
This attitude is how I end up having to decipher that a loop of divs is just a simple list, or have to decipher that some other weird div with complex onClick events was just an anchor (a link).
There's plenty of benefits from writing semantically meaningful html and "professional web developers" should care about those if they want to write maintainable quality products rather than the next overbloated 5 MB JS broken e-commerce.
Professional web developers don't have time to create elaborate abstractions for the sake of making their code "semantic" and easily understood by visitors reading their website's source.
Websites are ultimately for the user agent. "Semantic" HTML and CSS were never really so. They were guidelines to create code that was way more abstract than necessary and smuggled in a lot of terminology and concepts from print media, all of which were somewhat important before there were things like Firebug and proper dev tools.