The ﹤main﹥ element

Has anyone used all of the HTML5 tags in anger? I've tried a couple of times to build something fully "semantic". I struggle to create something that looks good semantically (ie just reading the HTML) and is also laid out on the page in the way I wanted it to be.

There seem to be lots of situations, even in just mildly complicated web pages, where you need to write HTML code solely for graphics / layout reasons that completely breaks the idea of having a purely semantic document.

In the end it just seemed much faster and cleaner to be more flexible with those various structures and to give up on the whole "semantic" document ideal and smash divs around.

I'm ready to fully accept that this is the tables->css revolution all over again and I'm just crap, though, if that's the case.

Re: The ﹤main﹥ element

#5

Post by wiradikusuma » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 9:44 AM UTC

The good thing is it'll be easier for robots to crawl pages to find the, well, main content. E.g. scrapers for websites without RSS support.

The bad thing is if the robot is a search engine spider, people will use try to serve different 'main'.

Re: The ﹤main﹥ element

#6

Post by derefr » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 9:45 AM UTC

Sounds convenient for one major use: letting web-scraping and readability-like tools know that everything outside of is alright to throw away.

Re: The ﹤main﹥ element

#7

Post by JonnieCache » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 9:46 AM UTC

SCdF wrote: post #4

Has anyone used all of the HTML5 tags in anger? I've tried a couple of times to build something fully "semantic". I struggle to create something that looks good semantically (ie just reading the HTML) and is also laid out on the page in the way I wanted it to be. There seem to be lots of situations, even in just mildly complicated web pages, where you need to write HTML code solely for graphics / layout reasons that…

It really depends on what kind of page you're making. If you're doing a heavily optimised landing page where everything has to be just-so, you might need to smash a few divs.

If you're just making a basic page that's not too designy, you can produce some beautiful looking html. It looks even better in haml. Write some sass for it and you will reach a higher state of markup consciousness.

Re: The ﹤main﹥ element

#8

Post by pestaa » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 9:56 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #6

Sounds convenient for one major use: letting web-scraping and readability-like tools know that everything outside of is alright to throw away.

I consider navigation not alright to throw away, but wouldn't put it in either.

Re: The ﹤main﹥ element

#9

Post by chrisfarms » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 10:01 AM UTC

The ARIA roles ideas seem to address the semantics/accessibility issues much better than semantic tags.

Plus with the direction that the Web Components stuff is going, I think they should probably scrap all the semantic elements, just stick to a smaller set of HTML elements that are "functionally" different. Then tell everyone to create their own tag-semantics by extending the basic elements for their use-case and use the standard roles taxonomy to describe the intent of the user-created tags.

It feel a bit like parts of the groups are not talking enough :)

Re: The ﹤main﹥ element

#10

Post by phpnode » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 10:05 AM UTC

it's annoying that it can't be used more than once per page. It would be useful to also have a element, e.g.

    
        ...
        ...
        ...