Comment by littlestymaar
4 days ago
Not really. This would not be different to <table> and associated elements, which are arguably better than a div soup.
4 days ago
Not really. This would not be different to <table> and associated elements, which are arguably better than a div soup.
Yes, really. Even <table> is used to represent the data, not the layout, though it will be laid out as a table but it's probably the only element that does such a thing.
> Yes, really. Even <table> is used to represent the data, not the layout
Nope. It's a html tag to lay out data in a table form!
> but it's probably the only element that does such a thing.
<pre>, <b>, <i> all come with an associated layout implication. But the worst offender are <div> and <span>, which carry zero semantic meaning and just means “I'm a block element” and “I'm an inline element”, those are pure layout element. In fact are the ones I'm using as template for my demand of <flex> or <grid> elements.
And html isn't just tags, it's tags and attributes on these tags, and things like hidden, height or width are indisputably related to layout and not to data.
The idea of HTML as a pure semantic layer with no layout consideration may be a general design philosophy for the language, but that's by no way a faithful description of what HTML actually is in practice. And pretending it is, isn't helping.
Eh. HTML in its recent iterations made it very clear to try and separate itself from layout concerns. It's why <font> was deprecated.
With that: <table> is really only meant for actual tabular data and not about layout. It really isn't about the layout. It got abused for layout because it was the only thing that worked in a lot of cases (especially amusingly enough, email)
<b> and <i> I think I'd agree, even if they did eventually get retconned to be "bring attention to" and "idiomatic text". Same with <strong> and friends. This happened with other elements too.
I think it's fair to acknowledge the realities (people who are writing HTML a lot of times use <b> to mean "bold") of usages but ideally the semantic meanings are useful. I have seen cases where "<strong>" emphasizes it by doing something other than bold for example
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