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Comment by vaylian | Hacker News Reader

Because a lot of web frontend developers are addicted to <div> soup and fancy CSS and JavaScript libraries.

It's also due to browser not doing anything useful with the additional tags, if I use <article>, <section> or <div> doesn't make any difference, my browser doesn't use that to generate a TOC or let me open an <article> in a new Tab. Even the, in theory, incredible useful <time> tag seems to be completely invisible to my browser and many other potentialy useful tags don't exist in the first place (e.g. <unit> would be useful).

Maybe not the browser itself, but in combination with semantic CSS [1], it's incredibly useful.

[1] - eg https://picocss.com/

Yes, I think that is what browser should spend money on instead of inventing new syntax. Google Chrome still doesn't support alternate stylesheets. But I refuse to not use them simply because a rich company can't be bothered to implement decades old standards.

We just don't have enough tags that we can really take advantage of on a semantic or programmatic level, and that has lead to other tags getting overloaded and thus losing meaning.

Why don't we just have markup for a table of contents in 2025?

That'd open a whole new can of worms. Browsers are already gargantuan pieces of software even with the relatively primitive tags we have today. We don't need to further argue with each other what the <toc> tag should look and behave like, deal with unforeseen edge cases and someone's special use cases which end up requiring them to implement the whole thing with <ol>s and <li>s anyway.

Then let the edge cases use <ol> and <li>, and in some sense all those website style simplifiers that comes built-in with Safari will just have to deal with those edge cases. Similarly we have a built-in date picker, and if you don't think it's good enough then build a better one.

> It's also due to browser not doing anything useful with the additional tags,

It's clear that you are sighted and never use reader mode.

Exactly this. I really wish browsers would use semantic html to make content more accessible for me, a sighted user! Why does my browser not give me a table of contents I can use to navigate a long page?

I think the parent has a good point: browsers don't do anything with these tags for sighted users, who are unfortunately the majority of developers. If they were to notice benefits to using semantic tags, maybe they'd use them more often.

Developers of all people should be in a position to notice how tag semantics can keep them oriented in a document or target behavior and styling…

It’s interesting, because if you imagine sites actually using these tags to be maximally compatible with reader mode and other accessibility modes, they’re setting themselves up perfectly to be viewed without ads.

I use reader mode by default in Safari because it’s essentially the ultimate ad blocker: it throws the whole site away and just shows me the article I want to read.

But this is in opposition to what the website owners want, which is to thwart reader mode and stuff as many ads in my way as they can.

It’s possible good accessibility is antithetical to the ad-driven web. It’s no wonder sites don’t bother with it.

Reader mode seems to still work if you have a div with article text in it. I would be interested to see a comparison of what works and what doesn’t if such a reference exists though!

Reader mode is based on a whole slew of heuristics including tag names, class names, things like link-to-text-content ratio, and other stuff I can't recall. IIRC it considers semantic tag names a stronger signal than e.g. class names, so having <article> in your page isn't necessary but helps a lot.

Not true. Using semantic HTML and relying on its implicit ARIA roles allows the browser to construct an accurate AOM tree (Accessibility Object Model) which makes it possible for screen readers and other human interface software to create TOCs and other landmark-based navigation.

> Not true. Using semantic HTML and relying on its implicit ARIA roles allows the browser to construct an accurate AOM tree (Accessibility Object Model) which makes it possible for screen readers and other human interface software to create TOCs and other landmark-based navigation.

Sure, it allows the browser to do that. GP is complaining that even though browsers are allowed to do all that, they typically don't.

The point of the reply was that they actually do. It's just not obvious that they do if you don't use that method yourself.

If you want a specific behavior for <time> then write a browser plugin which e.g. converts the <time> content to your local time.

But if you are a developer you should see value in <article> and <section> keeping your markup much much nicer which in turn should make your tests much easier to write.

Semantic tags were never widely used, even before the overuse of JavaScript.

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