News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:I'm Betting on HTML by lmm on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:34AM (#36967290)
They don't. Like, that linked document is a cool idea but it's utterly inaccurate as a description of how the tags are used by actually existing website or handled by actually existing user agents (yes, including screenreaders).
Re:I'm Betting on HTML by cratermoon on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:26PM (#36976859)
Perhaps the tags have not been de facto treated semantically by existing practices. There’s a great deal wrong with the tag soup pervading the web. Current convention doesn’t mean they can’t have semantics.
Re:I'm Betting on HTML by lmm on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @06:38PM (#36978770)
Potentially they could have semantics in the future, but right now they don't. If you make a user agent that relies on them having those semantics, that user agent will misinterpret a lot of web pages.
Re:I'm Betting on HTML by cratermoon on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @11:49PM (#36981133)
I can create CSS to style the two tags accordingly, and in within my own work I can make them mean different things to the tools I use to create and manage html.
Re:I'm Betting on HTML by lmm on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @11:52PM (#36981157)
Sure. But you could always do that for any tags, regardless of - even in opposition to - their official semantics.
Re:I'm Betting on HTML by cratermoon on Thursday August 03, 2023 @02:59PM (#36990188)
There are only two hard problems in programming: cache invalidation and naming. When programmers give something a name inconsistent with it's behavior, it's going to cause a problem.