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On The (2021)

benmyers.dev

121–130 of 138 posts

Re: On The <dl> (2021)

#121
post #73
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like it's CSS' fault then. I think that just like they introduced `display:contents` to remove wrappers, they should also introduce a way to group elements as if they had a common ancestor. :wrap(dt, dt+dd) {border: solid 1px}

Proposal from 2016 (closed): https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/588

Seems the original ::contents proposal is where it's at now, though there hasn't been action on it for some time. Not sure if they hit a snag or it's just on the back burner

https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/2406

This proposal has the benefit of not violating the tree structure should multiple :wrap rules apply to overlapping elements.

Re: On The <dl> (2021)

#123
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person who daily drives a screen reader, I so agree with this. We'd all be better off if the W3 dispensed with all that ideological semantic purity BS and started doing more realpolitik. Think not about whether your API is semantically pure, but about what developers want to do, what hacks they'll use to achieve their goals despite your objections, and how to enable doing those things in a way that is maximally…

Good news! `.ariaNotify()` is basically a real implementation of your hypothetical document.speakText. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/ari...

Cool, waiting for browsers to pick it up nice and green

Re: On The <dl> (2021)

#124
Great post. Very minor nitpick: ‘The small element must not be used for subheadings; for that purpose, use the hgroup element.’

‘The small element represents side comments such as small print. Small print typically features disclaimers, caveats, legal restrictions, or copyrights. Small print is also sometimes used for attribution, or for satisfying licensing requirements.’

(https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/text-level-semantics....)

Re: On The <dl> (2021)

#125
All the native GUI toolkits are dead, but people can write entire essays now on a single HTML element. I guess that's progress?

Re: On The <dl> (2021)

#126
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. “Unordered” implies “reordering doesn’t change meaning.” And yet that’s already implicit in the bullets (vs numbers). So is it a decoration hint? Or is it actually semantic? And what system is interpreting the semantics rather than the visual presentation?

HyperText Markup Language is semantic. You're marking up a document to show what information it contains, where it contains it, and how it relates to other documents or information. Reading markup causes browsers to display things, but that's incidental. In theory. In practice, no one cares about semantics and the choice of tags is based on how a target set of browsers happens to display them. Your question about who…

> nothing in the stack wants you to do that

Meaning treat semantic markup as a principle. Most modern tools are not that interested in 2010s ideas about separation of design and content.

Re: On The <dl> (2021)

#127
post #62

This is going to be unpopular here, but life became easier when I quit trying to write semantic HTML. It’s just poorly designed, I’m sorry. Every time I’ve reached for a I’ve eventually regretted it because I wanted multiple levels of wrappers, or a divider between sections, or an icon, or a heading spanning multiple key-value pairs, etc. They make this stuff with some flexibility but nowhere near enough to actually…

As a person who daily drives a screen reader, I so agree with this. We'd all be better off if the W3 dispensed with all that ideological semantic purity BS and started doing more realpolitik. Think not about whether your API is semantically pure, but about what developers want to do, what hacks they'll use to achieve their goals despite your objections, and how to enable doing those things in a way that is maximally…

[deleted]

Re: On The <dl> (2021)

#128
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice today, that's fine. Typically authors have a hard time differentiating what "emphasis," "importance," and "bring attention to" mean to them. Therefore, nothing conveys a distinction by default.

So then what's the point of making this distinction? I would like to see surveys of how many people actually author content in forms that differentiate between b and strong.

> So then what's the point of making this distinction?

It keeps the semantic web people busy not doing too much damage. Otherwise we might get an XHTML3 or CSS4 based on RDF triples or some such horror.

Re: On The <dl> (2021)

#129

The world's first website makes heavy use of s. https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html https://info.cern.ch/ (A landing page of sorts to give context and orientation about the actual first website.)

Good website. It's responsive.

Re: On The <dl> (2021)

#130

List history (listory?) lesson, kids: As the link below to a 1985 IBM mainframe DCF/GML manual shows, DL-DT-DD have been a thing since before the web. In addition to Definition lists (DL), the 40+ year-old documentation describes Glossary lists (GL), Ordered lists (OL), Unordered lists (UL), and Simple lists (SL). ibm :: 370 :: DCF :: SH35-0050-2 Document Composition Facility Generalized Markup Language Implementatio…

Isn't it description list?

FWIW, the Wikipedia page on "HTML elements" says:

>A description list (a.k.a. association list or definition list)[...]

The "Definition list" Wikipedia article is a redirect to that paragraph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_element#dl

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