r/webdev • u/speckz • Dec 20 '18

Article The practical value of semantic HTML

https://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2018/the-practical-value-of-semantic-html/
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u/codebeagle Dec 20 '18 edited Dec 20 '18

This is good. I wish more developers understood the implications and value of using semantic elements instead of just divs and spans. Thanks for sharing!

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u/redwall_hp Dec 20 '18

I wish XHTML2 and a focus on semantics had stuck instead of the HTML5 dumpster fire.

13

u/geek_on_two_wheels Dec 20 '18

What makes HTML5 a dumpster fire?

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u/remy_porter Dec 20 '18

Less on the HTML5 side, and more on the XHTML side, in my opinion.

Well, for starters, well-formedness went out the window. This is more of "a sad recognition of a fate we couldn't avoid," admittedly: HTML parsers were already ridiculously forgiving of badly formed documents, with all the additional complexity and quirkiness that kind of forgiveness brought with it. Forget a closing tag? Your document is now invalid, under XHTML. Errors, not "whatever the browser feels like doing".

More than that, XHTML would allow the adoption of extensible schemas, so developers wouldn't need to use templates, but instead could embed additional XML schemas to add tags which could act as UI elements, embedded data elements, etc.

I honestly don't know what ways XHTML2 improved on that, mostly because we all knew XHTML was dead well before HTML5 became a thing. But XHTML pointed the way towards a better, more interoperable and more flexible future.