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Comment by ummonk | Hacker News Reader

No, HTML is fundamentally different because (for a static site without any JS dom manipulation) it has all the semantic content, while stylesheets, images, objects, etc. are just about presentation.

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Images are content. Videos are content. Objects/iframes are content.

The only one that is presentational is stylesheets.

Which (as I'm sure you know), also literally has 'content' :)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/content

True :)

Images and videos are not semantic content. The alt attributes that describe them on the other hand are indeed semantic content.

> Images and videos are not semantic content

Something in that tenet does not compute with me.

I think the distinction is "semantic on what level/perspective?". An image packaged as a binary blob is semantically opaque until it is rendered. Meanwhile, seeing <img> in the HTML or the file extension .jpg in any context that displays file extensions tells me some information right out of the gate. And note that all three of these examples are different information: the HTML tag tells me it's an image, whereas the file extension tells me it's a JPEG image, and the image tells me what the image contains. HTML is an example of some kind of separation, as it can tell you some semantic meaning of the data without telling you all of it. Distinguishing and then actually separating semantics means data can be interpreted with different semantics, and we usually choose to focus on one alternative interpretation. Then I can say that HTML alone regards some semantics (e.g. there is an image here) while disregarding others (e.g. the image is an image of a brick house).

I'm not sure what isn't computing. Presumably you know (or have looked up) the meaning of "semantic"? Images and videos are graphic, not semantic, content. To the extent they are rendering semantic content, that content should be described in the alt tag.

Can you describe what semantic, non-textual content would be?

Iframes exist.

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