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A comment on Front-End Checklist. Parent comment

Re:Front-End Checklist by ozaark on Thursday October 19, 2017 @12:13PM (#15509171)
Practical benefit: users and search engines parse the content of the page for information about the subject matter, including Google Images. I agree having an img with an empty alt tag is OK, but it's not helping search optimization and neither is alt=round corner gradient (unless of course that is your subject matter :-)

Imagine reading a printed text page about dogs and peppered throughout the text was mentions of 'bezel flare 2' or similar. If it doesn't make sense for that to be on the page as text alone then it shouldn't be on the page at all.

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Re:Front-End Checklist by seanwilson on Thursday October 19, 2017 @02:18PM (#15510252)
It just doesn't sound significant to me. Crawlers and screen readers happily ignore div and span tags that add nothing to the content, they ignore mobile scaling meta tags in the head etc.
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Re:Front-End Checklist by ozaark on Thursday October 19, 2017 @02:53PM (#15510580)
> they ignore mobile scaling meta tags in the head

Actually the meta viewport "Helps Google’s algorithms accurately assign indexing properties to the page rather than needing to signal the existence of corresponding desktop/mobile pages." [1]

Every bit of code on a page is interpreted a certain way for a reason. HTML5 now has more semantic tags like header and nav that add an additional layer of certainty over context. I'll concede that most developers seem to not care about the reasons why so long as they can push code to production faster.

[1] https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo...

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