Re:How Twitter is Destroying the Web
by jt2190 on Thursday October 03, 2013 @10:45PM
(#6493437)
> There is, however, a major problem with Twitters
> bootstrap framework... [a] return to all the problems
> that came with tables. A complete rejection of the
> agreed upon separation between semantic content and
> visual design.
First of all, the semantic web was never widely agreed upon in practice [1], simply because almost everyone is interested in generating a particular page layout first. For whatever reason, the standards bodies have tried to pretend that prioritizing the semantic web in the HTML standards would somehow change the behavior of most web developers. It hasn't.
The fundamental issue is that there was a "tight coupling" between page layout and data structure in early web browsers, and while CSS has helped separate layout from HTML, it has not changed the behavior of web developers en masse, who will hack HTML to kingdom come if it gets them the page layout they want. (If you only every use <div> tags, you're not doing semantic HTML.)
But things are actually looking quite bright, because we now have RESTful web services, that operate solely with data structures (typically JSON), so REST is essentially the modern semantic web. That frees HTML from the burden of being a data structure at all.
Now if we could just replace HTML and CSS with something that actually gave you a WYSIWYG page layout, we'd be all set.
[1] As evidence of this, I point you to the HTML parsers of all major browsers, and the Google web crawler/parser. Neither of these assume that pages are valid, let alone semantic.
The fundamental issue is that there was a "tight coupling" between page layout and data structure in early web browsers, and while CSS has helped separate layout from HTML, it has not changed the behavior of web developers en masse, who will hack HTML to kingdom come if it gets them the page layout they want. (If you only every use <div> tags, you're not doing semantic HTML.)
But things are actually looking quite bright, because we now have RESTful web services, that operate solely with data structures (typically JSON), so REST is essentially the modern semantic web. That frees HTML from the burden of being a data structure at all.
Now if we could just replace HTML and CSS with something that actually gave you a WYSIWYG page layout, we'd be all set.
[1] As evidence of this, I point you to the HTML parsers of all major browsers, and the Google web crawler/parser. Neither of these assume that pages are valid, let alone semantic.