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Comment by Lowkeyloki | Hacker News Reader

The author is right, but this comes off very much as "old man yells at cloud" to me. Sorry.

Let me give slightly more context. As a developer, I'd love to use div less often. However, I feel like the promise of the "semantic web" fell short. And "web components" as a first-class HTML citizen isn't really there. So React/Vue components are the best we've got even though they're actually just divs and spans at the lowest level. I want the web to be semantic and componentized. But it's not there yet and this is the best we've got.

You can use React/Vue and still write semantic HTML, no?

I mainly work in React. You can write semantic HTML up to a point. Things like article, section, header, footer, etc. are supported. But if you wanted to make up your own tag and expect it to act like a div, I think React would complain that it doesn't understand that tag.

That's what I meant by "the promise of the semantic web". As I originally understood it, you could make your own custom tags that describe the intent of the document. You wouldn't be bound by what the w3c or browser vendors blessed. Any tags that were unknown to the browser would be treated mostly the same as a div. Web components occupy a similar space.

That does not match how I think of the semantic web at all. For example:

> make your own custom tags that describe the intent of the document

If you make up your own tags for everything then to a visitor (human, bot, indexer or otherwise) it describes nothing, since those tags only have that meaning on your site (and worse, they have different meanings on other sites). Semantic web or RDF or Linked Data or whatever you want to call it is not about describing your document within the context of your document, it's about making sure your document is understood in relation to all the documents that link to it and all the documents that it links to.

I looked up what the semantic web actually is and you're right. But at the same time, I was surprised to find that it's all properties! The tags are all divs and spans!

I guess the semantic web is orthogonal to this discussion. My apologies. I guess it's another buzzword that was thrown around for a time. In that case, assume I meant web components whenever I said semantic web.

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