5 ms·

> What has semantic HTML ever done for us? For us small things, like enable reader views. For people with disabilities, it lets them effectively use screen rea

by aylmao 4y ago

> What has semantic HTML ever done for us? For us small things, like enable reader views. For people with disabilities, it lets them effectively use screen readers.

cratermoon 4y ago
The accessibility aspect is huge and deserves more attention and kudos than it gets. Also, from a purely selfish aspect, I vastly prefer documents with at least a minimum of semantic organization, even if it's just header, footer, main, and meaningful heading levels. Without those, well, it's just a document full of undifferentiated text with various attributes to distinguish it visually or typographically, and usually inconsistently used. Is this piece of text styled "bold with fontsize 16" supposed to be a second or 3rd level header?
imgabe 4y ago
What stops screen readers from treating the tag the same way they treat the tag? If functionally ends up doing the same thing that did, what's the point?
- reaperducer 4y ago
 for things that should be italic for visual reasons. For example, the titles of books. for things that are emphasized, as in emphatic expressions within text. For example "You'll get nothing and you'll like it."
 - gnubison 4y ago
 *<cite>
 - Tomte 4y ago
 <cite> is also pure joy. From MDN: > It's worth noting that the W3C specification says that a reference to a creative work, as included within a <cite> element, may include the name of the work's author. However, the WHATWG specification for <cite> says the opposite: that a person's name must never be included, under any circumstances.
 - josteink 4y ago
 In short, if you want to avoid making errors, just don’t use <cite>.
 - jll29 4y ago
 I find this interesting, and wish the W3C could work this out more: In one possible future, 'cite' elements (and the absence thereof) could be used to inform/assist human and automatic fact checking.
 - mananaysiempre 4y ago
 There are also other things that are not emphasized, but require italics per typographical convention, e.g. foreign-language fragments.
 - nirimda 4y ago
 It doesn't have clear semantics. <cite> is basically used as "I want something in italics, and it is the title of something" rather than "here is a reference to a creative work". And it gives the lie to semantic markup: we only ever have semantic markup for things we can reasonably expect to be visually set-off. Something like a persons name or a cut-off phrase are never marked up semantically; there could be massive benefits from semantically attributing lists of city/state combinations in flowing text but it just doesn't happen. There's nothing more than semantically attributed visual markup, rather than being semantic markup, and this kind of renaming of is just going overboard.
 - yakubin 4y ago
 TIL. ~15 years ago I read "don't use , use ", and so I did. Now it seems I need to go and change a bunch of s to s.
- stubish 4y ago
 A screen reader that did this would need to heuristically determine if the speech should be emphasized or not. Because you don't emphasize much of what is read when reading italicized text.
 - masswerk 4y ago
 The point being, if italics were already used to add emphasis and to separate an expression from the rest of the utterance, why was a dedicated tag required to express emphasis? (The heuristics only apply now, as there are two kinds of emphasis, which introduces some uncertainty of how things should be expressed. Moreover, as type styles have moved to CSS, there's a chance that a screen reader presentation may miss an intended separation of text.)
 - Yoric 4y ago
 In terms of typography, italics are also applied for titles, for quotes (in some contexts), for foreign expressions, sometimes for dialogs, and sometimes simply because they are easier to read. For a screen reader, you don't want to emphasize these use cases.
 - masswerk 4y ago
 They are still used to separate that expression, to make the expression stand out from the rest of the text. Surely, if I set a quote in italics, I mean this to be read in a distinctive voice by an aural presentation. (This is the entire point of separating it by a distinctive type style. I'm actually somewhat alarmed that this isn't the case.) Edit: There's a clear meaning to the use of distinctive type styles. I don't see an intrinsic value in pretending and that there is no such intended meaning and that there should be an artificial separation, rather than generalizing on presentation styles. Edit #2: In Antiqua, italics isn't just oblique text, it's an entirely different script. So what is the use case and the intended meaning of using a different script? Isn't this more conceptual than just using a fancy visual presentation style, which may be happily ignored in any other representation as there's probably no intended meaning to this?
 - 4y ago
bobajeff 4y ago
Relevant: https://www.stefanjudis.com/today-i-learned/em-and-strong-are-not-be-announced-by-screen-readers/ https://www.stefanjudis.com/today-i-learned/em-and-strong-ar...
csande17 4y ago
Modern web developers don't use semantic HTML for screen reader support. They manually apply screen reader interpretation data the same way they manually apply Tailwind styles to every element. (That's what WAI-ARIA is for, most notably the "role" attribute.)
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
 Most of the new HTML5 elements (main, aside, article, section, nav…) have an implicit ARIA role, no need to add one manually.
 - csande17 4y ago
 A lot of the old ones do too, but elements not named <div> are an elitist conspiracy to prevent people from becoming web developers.
- maxwelljoslyn 4y ago
 Sounds like a rat's nest of fragility. :(

by aylmao 4y ago

> What has semantic HTML ever done for us? For us small things, like enable reader views. For people with disabilities, it lets them effectively use screen readers.

cratermoon 4y ago

The accessibility aspect is huge and deserves more attention and kudos than it gets. Also, from a purely selfish aspect, I vastly prefer documents with at least a minimum of semantic organization, even if it's just header, footer, main, and meaningful heading levels. Without those, well, it's just a document full of undifferentiated text with various attributes to distinguish it visually or typographically, and usually inconsistently used. Is this piece of text styled "bold with fontsize 16" supposed to be a second or 3rd level header?

imgabe 4y ago

What stops screen readers from treating the tag the same way they treat the tag? If functionally ends up doing the same thing that did, what's the point?

reaperducer 4y ago
 for things that should be italic for visual reasons. For example, the titles of books. for things that are emphasized, as in emphatic expressions within text. For example "You'll get nothing and you'll like it."
- gnubison 4y ago
 *<cite>
 - Tomte 4y ago
 <cite> is also pure joy. From MDN: > It's worth noting that the W3C specification says that a reference to a creative work, as included within a <cite> element, may include the name of the work's author. However, the WHATWG specification for <cite> says the opposite: that a person's name must never be included, under any circumstances.
 - josteink 4y ago
 In short, if you want to avoid making errors, just don’t use <cite>.
 - jll29 4y ago
 I find this interesting, and wish the W3C could work this out more: In one possible future, 'cite' elements (and the absence thereof) could be used to inform/assist human and automatic fact checking.
 - mananaysiempre 4y ago
 There are also other things that are not emphasized, but require italics per typographical convention, e.g. foreign-language fragments.
 - nirimda 4y ago
 It doesn't have clear semantics. <cite> is basically used as "I want something in italics, and it is the title of something" rather than "here is a reference to a creative work". And it gives the lie to semantic markup: we only ever have semantic markup for things we can reasonably expect to be visually set-off. Something like a persons name or a cut-off phrase are never marked up semantically; there could be massive benefits from semantically attributing lists of city/state combinations in flowing text but it just doesn't happen. There's nothing more than semantically attributed visual markup, rather than being semantic markup, and this kind of renaming of is just going overboard.
- yakubin 4y ago
 TIL. ~15 years ago I read "don't use , use ", and so I did. Now it seems I need to go and change a bunch of s to s.
stubish 4y ago
A screen reader that did this would need to heuristically determine if the speech should be emphasized or not. Because you don't emphasize much of what is read when reading italicized text.
- masswerk 4y ago
  The point being, if italics were already used to add emphasis and to separate an expression from the rest of the utterance, why was a dedicated tag required to express emphasis? (The heuristics only apply now, as there are two kinds of emphasis, which introduces some uncertainty of how things should be expressed. Moreover, as type styles have moved to CSS, there's a chance that a screen reader presentation may miss an intended separation of text.)
  - Yoric 4y ago
    In terms of typography, italics are also applied for titles, for quotes (in some contexts), for foreign expressions, sometimes for dialogs, and sometimes simply because they are easier to read. For a screen reader, you don't want to emphasize these use cases.
    - masswerk 4y ago
      They are still used to separate that expression, to make the expression stand out from the rest of the text. Surely, if I set a quote in italics, I mean this to be read in a distinctive voice by an aural presentation. (This is the entire point of separating it by a distinctive type style. I'm actually somewhat alarmed that this isn't the case.) Edit: There's a clear meaning to the use of distinctive type styles. I don't see an intrinsic value in pretending and that there is no such intended meaning and that there should be an artificial separation, rather than generalizing on presentation styles. Edit #2: In Antiqua, italics isn't just oblique text, it's an entirely different script. So what is the use case and the intended meaning of using a different script? Isn't this more conceptual than just using a fancy visual presentation style, which may be happily ignored in any other representation as there's probably no intended meaning to this?
  - 4y ago

bobajeff 4y ago

Relevant: https://www.stefanjudis.com/today-i-learned/em-and-strong-are-not-be-announced-by-screen-readers/ https://www.stefanjudis.com/today-i-learned/em-and-strong-ar...

csande17 4y ago

Modern web developers don't use semantic HTML for screen reader support. They manually apply screen reader interpretation data the same way they manually apply Tailwind styles to every element. (That's what WAI-ARIA is for, most notably the "role" attribute.)

eurasiantiger 4y ago
Most of the new HTML5 elements (main, aside, article, section, nav…) have an implicit ARIA role, no need to add one manually.
- csande17 4y ago
 A lot of the old ones do too, but elements not named <div> are an elitist conspiracy to prevent people from becoming web developers.
maxwelljoslyn 4y ago
Sounds like a rat's nest of fragility. :(