Comment by ktpsns | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ktpsns | Hacker News Reader

I recently used Semantic-UI (http://semantic-ui.com/) in a project. Semantic-UI is a web framework where "semantic" means there are human readable class names like

   <button class="minor red labeled button">

Compared to Bootstrap, Semantic-UI ships with high level "components" ("views", "modules", "collections"). And here comes the ugly: They all abuse HTML as if it was 2008. Div soup everywhere. Even lists have to be formatted as Divs, something I havent done since ages, something like:

   <div class="ui list">
     <div class="ui list item">...</div>
     <div class="ui list item">...</div>
   </div>

It really felt as if the knowledge about semantic html tags got lost somewhere. Or the authors of this popular CSS framework have another understanding of "semantic". It doesen't meet my quality of structured HTML, thought.

https://tailwindcss.com/docs/utility-first/

You could always use a little classname vomit to go with your div soup.

The problem is that "modern" development has misplaced importance. It's become an incredibly selfish practice. There is more concern placed for the developers than the users.

“Semantic” eh? I don’t think that word means what the authors of the framework think it means. :)

This only seems beneficial if you're attempting to break compatibility with the browsers' built in understanding of ul and li tags (perhaps some concern that browsers will handle those tags differently in the future). Otherwise, they're just reinventing the wheel for the sake of doing so which may make for a fun exercise, probably shouldn't be used in a real project.

Oh my! I didn't believe that code example you just gave, so I had to go look it up for myself. I'm astounded.

https://semantic-ui.com/elements/list.html#list

to be somewhat/slightly fair, the very next example talks about using a `ul` for the list.

But according to the docs that's "for convenience". Its semantic value isn't discussed.

So presumably the 'proper' way to do it, if you're not looking for convenience, is to use `div`s. /s

this seems like it's "semantic" in a way that is completely useless for every use-case of semantic markup.

On the practical side, that could get one sued for ADA (accessibility) violations. The "reading machine" will not understand framework-specific classes.

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