Re:Getting to Xanadu
by jonathankoren on Saturday December 08, 2018 @11:24PM
(#18639284)
“In principle” is meaningless. Even the semantic tags that do exist are ineffective, as they aren’t used in practice (see TIME), completely ill defined (see CITE), or correspond to common use cases.
In practice — and that’s all that really matters — what you get are a mass of DIVs and SPANs where if there is any semantic information, it exists in the open vocabulary of CSS style classes.
https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/textlevel-semantics.html#elemen...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ci...
Except...it's not. Current HTML is mostly (entirely, in principle, but there are a couple holdout tags where that is strained) semantic rather than presentational, and there's very little layout-related in it (except insofar as all tags have overridable default presentation, and some of that is layout-related.)