Normally, I like the WHAT folk. I like the idea of “lets move things along”. They’ve managed to get in my craw though with some of the suggestions for what will eventually be the W3C HTML5 Recommendation (I imagine this will happen around the time I’m shopping for coffins).

Prescribing Design

The thing they’ve done that makes blood seep from my ears is the < footer > tag. What in the blue blazes is that about? Go ahead, read the Working Draft yourself. You know, I’m more pissed about this notional standard than I am about Microsoft or the Consortium’s recommendation track.

The “aside” element alone is worthy of marked fucking derision. For starters, the word itself is fucking stupid. The Draft describes an aside thus:

The aside element represents a section of a page that consists of content that is tangentially related to the content around the aside element, and which could be considered separate from that content. Such sections are often represented as sidebars in printed typography.

Here’s an idea, why not just call it the “sidebar” element? If we must have these things why not make them as generically termed as possible? Calling it an aside is asinine. Go ahead and look up “aside” in the dictionary{ref1}.

a•side

noun

1. a remark or passage by a character in a play that is intended to be heard by the audience but unheard by the other characters in the play.

2. a remark that is not directly related to the main topic of discussion

Now, let’s see if we can find… oh here it is:

side•bar

noun

a short article in a newspaper or magazine, typically boxed, placed alongside a main article, and containing additional or explanatory material.

• a secondary, additional, or incidental thing; a side issue.

I figured that out without having to leave the house. It’s not just the semantics though. There are footer, header, article, section, and nav elements as well. The footer element:

The footer element represents the footer for the section it applies to. A footer typically contains information about its section such as who wrote it, links to related documents, copyright data, and the like.

The like? So does that mean I can put my search field in the footer or not? Or does that have to go in the nav element? The whole idea of these new (and in my opinion absurdly named) elements is to discourage the use of the div element willy-nilly.

Noble Intention

The hope is that eventually your page will be invalid HTML/CSS if you use the div element in a fashion not acceding to the demands of the W3C. The reason stated in the Draft being that This is a disaster from an accessibility point of view… I feel for the blind. My mom is blind. Outlawing the div won’t change anything though. Instead of tacking weird classes onto div elements I’ll just turn the section element into the new div element.

Just on a Ranting Tear now

It feels as though a principal conceit of HTML5 is that:

• a) we’ll all be writing blogs in the future
• b) most of us are so retarded we need more and more strict rules to enforce accessibility
• c) we must standardise common conventions

The people that don’t design for accessibility now, will still not be designing for accessibility when HTML5 reaches Candidate Recommendation status. Also, the suggestion that improperly used divs will be considered invalid could very well stifle design innovations in future. The very existence of certain elements may preclude the fashioning of new design conventions. I’d tell you what they’d look like but they don’t exist yet.

A div in all its generic connotation is a malleable piece of clay for me to play with. An “aside” (yech!) is only that. I still can’t understand why they thought that name was a good idea. It doesn’t even ascribe itself to common convention. I don’t know anyone that calls sidebars, “asides”. Near as I know the “aside” term is used to describe very short one sentence posts that directly point elsewhere. That’s how I’ve always found the term used. That’s the convention I’ve seen.

Sidebars, however, are usually on the left or right and are usually full of meta data for the post being read as well as pointers to wholly unrelated content found elsewhere on the site being read or as far afield as flickr.

Will I have to markup sidenotes as asides? They’re on the side. That’s why I call them sidenotes. I could continue to mark them up as div class=“sidenote” but do I then run the risk of getting a raspberry from the validator?

I understand the needs of accessibility but I just don’t think this is the way to go about it. It feels like pandering to a design fad that will be out of fashion (I hope) by the time the Draft is even a Recommendation.