3 ms·

Huh. I would have said just the opposite about HTML; seems to me that slapping down some structural divisions and worrying about layout later is much more explo

• euccastro 19y ago
  If your HTML is generated programatically, you can roll your own mechanism for separation of concerns in the source. I see merits in standards compliance, but making my life easier is not necessarily one of them.
• olavk 19y ago
  His point is that it is more "exploratory" not to use semantic markup, since you might not know the semantics of the document structure while you are developing. It seems backwards to me though, surely the most "semantic-free" approach is to default to divs rather than tables to structure the markup.
  • philh 19y ago
    It's all meaningless unless you intend it to have meaning. But tables are probably easier to work with. (That may change in future, but right now I don't think any mainstream tools assume markup is semantic. And in any case, tables aren't much moreso than divs.)
    • bct 19y ago
      > right now I don't think any mainstream tools assume markup is semantic. Depends on what you're talking about; anything that uses microformats does, for example. Tools generally can't assume that tables are semantic, because they've been so heavily abused. That's not going to change though. Perhaps the best solution is a <yes-this-is-really-a-table> element. > tables aren't much moreso than divs. Would you say that a table in a relational database isn't much more semantic than a string of bytes?