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Comment by nnash | Hacker News Reader

>divs are not semantic HTML

This is very wrong, divs are as semantic as you want them to be. If you have an element that looks like this: <div> <div> <div><p>Hello World<p></div> </div> </div>

Then yeah sure it's not semantic because you have two unnecessary divs holding a paragraph, but if it was just the one div holding a paragraph tag it would be perfectly acceptable in HTML 4.x onwards. The only cases I can see a div being non semantic are the silly example I gave above, self closing divs in HTML (not extensible) and empty divs.

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> divs are as semantic as you want them to be.

Then they are not semantic at all.

<div class="content">, <div class="post-title">, <div class="meta-data"> all have semantic CSS class names. But they are not semantic HTML names. Remove the CSS, and all you have is <div>, <div>, and <div>. This makes it difficult for screen readers (and web surfers who don't use CSS (are these people even real?)) to understand what the page is saying.

However <article>, <header>, and <aside> all have semantic meaning that can be discerned whether or not CSS is used.

Also: Whether or not something validates is not a good indicator of it being "semantic".

You cannot use ONLY these "meant to be" semantic tags (<article>, <header>, ...) to describe semantically all the content you have. Divs is then the only way to go I know.

I'll quote ricardobeat's comment above (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4284877):

"Not every, but 95% do. For the rest, there are other pssibilities and tools to make sense of it (microdata, ARIA attributes, etc). Just ignoring semantics altogether won't do any better."

Your understanding of semantics is a bit hazy. Conversely to the pull quote you grabbed from me any semantic element can be used in a non-semantic way.

I agree I still have much to learn. But I don't let this get in the way of trying to "do things right" :-)

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