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Nah, semantics are worthless. The whole semantic web idea never took off for good reasons, HTML5 semantic tags don't have any meaningful semantics and you can't
by mike_hearn 3y ago
Nah, semantics are worthless. The whole semantic web idea never took off for good reasons, HTML5 semantic tags don't have any meaningful semantics and you can't even reliably remove boilerplate from HTML without ML pipelines (a basic use case you'd expect any "semantic" document format to nail easily). Then the invention of LLMs killed it twice over.
HTML is a graphics rendering language in denial about its true nature.
Grid took a long time because everything takes a long time when you have to align mutually competing organizations and there's no profit motive involved with the actual work itself. There's no real technical benefits to CSS layout over table tags. A table tag isn't a heavy object. CSS cascade calculations on the other hand ...
- Akronymus 3y agoCSS tables can have grid-auto-flow as dense, which is quite helpful at rare times. You obviously could do that wit tables + js, but it's nice to not have to worry about the implementation details.
- PetitPrince 3y agoI suggest you spend some time with a screen reader or have a look at the accessibility tab of you browser to get a feel of the worth of semantic web. It's true you won't ever have a perfect semantic representation of a page (and I have no idea how blind people manage those infinite scroller), but in my mind having <nav> or <div role="nav"> instead of <div class="my_non_standard_nav_classname"> still helps a lot on that aspect.
- mike_hearn 3y agoI use Shortcat all the time which relies heavily on the accessibility tree. Screen readers / accessibility tools don't use the semantic web. The semantic web doesn't exist, it refers to the Tim Berners-Lee vision of documents being XML or RDF data structures with schemas, transformed into pixels using stylesheets and XSL:T. It never happened for various reasons.