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Comment by parhamn | Hacker News Reader

> One thing I consistently dislike in these efforts is the misappropriation of HTML tags with certain semantics.

As a counterpoint, I don't understand people pushing strict semantics in html elements where they're not really strictly defined or generally useful. Because of how loose the spec with how these things can be used (it it weren't it'd be like schema.org meets html) scraper and other UI tools don't really look for these things and are very flexible in parsing and identifying structure. It'd be foolish to implement a html parser for the general web that strictly expects articles to be in article tags.

Browser default CSS for these things mostly suck and are rarely used, in this case they're overriding them anyway. So why stay pseudo-semantic?

Besides general accessibility (which is tag attribute based mostly), its not obvious to me how this critique is repeated so often with such little value.

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The problem of semantics is two-fold: you’re abusing one thing’s semantics (built-in HTML elements, ending up with something unsemantic in name or functionality), in order to avoid using one of the two mechanisms that are designed for naming semantics in styling and potentially functionality (which are: classes and custom elements).

The effects of the semantic abuse are admittedly slight, but they are still present, so all else being equal you should care at least a little about them. Tools like screen readers do distinguish between section, article and div in their landmark handling. By abusing these things, you are making life just a little bit harder for users of screen readers.

"you don't need CSS classes, but instead need to add aria-tags overriding the accessibility semantics" kind of invalidates the point of something like this IMHO.

> Besides general accessibility (which is tag attribute based mostly)

I was under the impression that semantic html elements imply certain aria tags (I read some mdn pages on this recently so I'm pretty confident in this impression, unless I confused proposed and actual specs). So, they can help with the ease of writing accessible UI.

Yes, the first rule of ARIA is if you can use HTML instead of ARIA attributes, do so; e.g. use <button>, not <div role="button">.

Some roles inherent to HTML elements are only conditionally exposed; e.g. the <section> element has the ARIA landmark role of "region" but assistive technologies that list landmarks should not include such section elements unless it has also been given an accessible name, e.g. <section aria-labelledby="contact-info"><h2 id="contact-info">Contact Info</h2> ... </section>. I've read that the <aside> element is not really an ARIA "complementary" landmark if it's the child of another landmark but in practice it still seems to be treated that way.

I think <article>the</article> right way to do it is to have <article>the</article> parser figure out which words are articles rather than explicitly tagging them. There are only three of them in English, and it's not a hard NLP problem. Of course, it's harder with Chinese, where there are countless measure words. And easier in <article>a</article> language without articles.

I am not sure if this is misunderstanding, satire, or trying to make a point.

The article tag refers to the other definition of article -- "magazine article", not "article of speech".

Well, I think it's definitely not satire. Satire generally has <article>an</article> "intent of shaming individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement." (source: Wikipedia). In other words satire has <article>a</article> target; it's making fun of someone or something, often with <article>the</article> goal of change. I definitely wasn't trying to mock anyone, affect change, or do anything ill-natured.

So I guess it might be one of <article>the</article> other options? :)

Boring question - could you spell out the point you were trying to make? I'm interested to hear it but it's currently kind of vague.

I made a dumb joke. It wasn't sarcasm, satire, snark, or any sort of point. It was a bit of wordplay. That's all. People liked it, and it got a few upvotes.

Someone asked a question, and I posted a response. Then everything got downvotes, so perhaps the response was no longer funny. I probably took it to far. So now I'm posting a clarification.

Or perhaps I'm reading too much into things.

Creating true accessibility is very difficult in my experience and involves a lot more than tag attributes. Screen readers like JAWS can be, again, very difficult to work with - so being as semantic as possible and maintaining "flattened" HTML are often necessary to get them to work properly for blind users.

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