HTML5 innovated in the wrong direction. At some level, I am a contientious thinker, and respect that any step forward is fine. Yet, and further, the decision for semantic tags is awful.
That's Right! I Went Political On That One! ⭐
Semantic elements must have been thought of by a non-HTML developer. The written experience is not valuable, and the true 100% for real, non-marketing jargon value add for HTML5 semantic elements is ZERO.
The conspicuous factor about the addition of these elements is that someone made the decision in the first place.
For the record, there is absolutely and undoubtedly zero value added for the human reader of an HTML page when is used instead of . The readers of the elements are web scraping utilities, i.e. software. The key player in this regard is Google.
An entire major spec was invented just for Google. That actually happened, and the world needs to recognize that.
Did you know? HTML5 is more than just semantic elements. Find out more and become an HTML Developer with HTML Handbook, available at my company alexason.com.
HTML Should Be For People
Any innovation should be for people. The end result should be human happiness. The driving goal percentage of the population affected toward happiness. This is how maximum good can be accomplished.
Most people believe it is reasonable for an organization to have a scope of population whom the responsiblility of "toward happiness" applies. While at my company we refute the claim, we can continue to examine HTML with that idea in mind.
In the context of HTML, the percentage of population affected is a lot. The technical term for this may even be considered "the inhabited earth." Any living user of the internet receives downstream decisions of WHATWG, the working group which defines HTML.
That working group did no justice for the human audience in the decision for semantic elements. It does nothing for the human readers. It makes the experience more wordy, complicated, and by the DevEx tradition of classifying coginitive load as undesirable, these additional elements make the experience worse.
I expect to hear a thought which goes, "But, but... accessibility!" I'll be clear. Accessibility is not optional, it is a requirement. I expect to hear that contending thought because a good HTML Developer has that in mind. Yet here is the pill to swallow: Semantic elements do nothing for accessibility. A Screen Reader (a screen reader is simply a web scraper) may implement some understanding of the elements, but it may not! Further, it's 2024, and there is no standardization in this regard. Moreover, the algorithms of what to do with the information must necessarily vary between developers, and the information of what the human reader wants to know about the page must also vary!
Semantic elements were only a step toward complication for the benefit of very few. WHATWG started as a company of "major" players in the internet biz, and it's clear their priorities were skewed. It is valuable technology for companies who's business model is web scraping, not for accessibility, but for content aggregation (i.e. search engines).
HTML should be for people. Human experience and the betterment in that area (generally, not financially), should be the goal of any major innovation with the effective reach of HTML. Instead we got technology to answer the question "How can this subsection be characterized?"
Better stated, it's a Secret Answer because no living thing reads the answer to that question. A business entity is not a living thing. A web scraper is not a living thing. Only a software writer is aware it's there, and as stated, the effect of this addition to the spec is an increase of cognitive load and worsening of experience.
Great 🙂
HTML For People
Let it be known that I think HTML5 and CSS3 are fantastic! CSS alone continues to be one of the most powerful rendering engines globally.
So what would be an improvement for HTML? In my book, the answer to that question will improve 1) developer happiness, and 2) have an valuable impact for screen readers without the need for further regulation of the screen readers!
I'm gonna drop some ideas here, and if you're interested swing by my company's working group.
Automatic content translation! Format dimension coersion! Whatever this button is!!
This Is The Whole Enchilada Version Of A Three-Part Series!
Leave a message with how you'd make HTML Better for Experience!
If you're interested in making Hypertext Applications for the purpose of Human Happiness, come to the party at Salvation! Salvation Company, where We Are Saved. Oh, and I hear the author of that HTML Handbook is a member at I'm sure there a sharable manuscript in the member library!
Top comments (1)
Semantic HTML is certainly about improving machine readability of content, but it's not particularly helpful for SEO. It is useful for accessibility tools, though. Moving more information about the markup into a consistent format provides screen readers and other content consumption techniques more information.
This has continued and extended into new semantic markup like the
<dialog>tag. This attempts to move something with wildly inconsistent, poorly accessible solutions across many libraries and frameworks into a common HTML element for user consistency.I think you could argue that AI companies received more benefit from semantic HTML than a search engine like Google, but my primary consideration is how it benefits the different access methods. Screen readers may seem like a tool just for the visually impaired, but with voice-based assistants, semantic HTML improves the ability to parse and speak relevant content while avoiding things like
<menu>and<aside>.