I look at 'div soup' HTML and shudder. The authors of it have not got a clue. They also make it hard for people who do write proper HTML with the correct tags, styling the elements and keeping the separation of concerns to do anything with it.
It is about organising your content, if everything is in div tags you might as well just upload JPGs of your web pages, with different ones for desktop and mobile.
Another game changer is CSS grid. You no longer need wrapper divs to do very basic tasks such as centering content. In fact content with horrible divs everywhere is a nightmare to style up with CSS grid.
An example of this is a basic form. With just the form elements and labels you can get it looking sweet in next to no time with CSS grid.
However, if some zombie has put lots of spans and divs around the form elements and done the labels wrong then you have to choose either to rebuild the backend thing that churns out the form or just style it up lame block layout style.
Pseudo selectors are also cool, there is no need to have silly 'i' elements and spans to put that asterisk after 'required'.
Some people like to keep it simple, doing HTML properly, others want to pootle along with their divs and class attributes. I know what will look good in ten years time and what will look outdated.
HTML5 introduced many features but the main course was the semantic elements. You can and you should write web pages with these elements and also be thinking in terms of them.
You may scorn the accessibility aspect but accessibility is easy if you use the right elements. Why would you not want to have it? There is also the mindset that goes with it - the web is for everyone, not just rich, white, English speaking males with perfect eyesight.
The article is spot on and extremely well said. Styling elements rather than make believe classes is particularly well said.
I would say that people who create div soup HTML should be banned from the internets, the work practices of overly complicating everything has been going on for too long.
I don't even regard div soup web pages as proper web pages, it is like comparing beige deep-fried processed food with freshly prepared from ingredients food.
> you might as well just upload JPGs of your web pages
That was not so uncommon in 1999 :-(
Seriously, it's 2019 and some developers still don't get the value of semantic markup while this has been beaten to death for at least 20 years. this profession is cluttered with too many tourists. I even talk with devs bragging about the lack of care for markup.
I wonder how well it would work to do that with JSON-LD micro-format markup.
Google don't care about HTML as they are way too clever for that. If I had more time I would like to see how they would rank two identical pages, one done properly and one that was a JPG image with a dangleberry of JSON-LD tacked on. I bet they latter would fare better!
I look at 'div soup' HTML and shudder. The authors of it have not got a clue. They also make it hard for people who do write proper HTML with the correct tags, styling the elements and keeping the separation of concerns to do anything with it.
It is about organising your content, if everything is in div tags you might as well just upload JPGs of your web pages, with different ones for desktop and mobile.
Another game changer is CSS grid. You no longer need wrapper divs to do very basic tasks such as centering content. In fact content with horrible divs everywhere is a nightmare to style up with CSS grid.
An example of this is a basic form. With just the form elements and labels you can get it looking sweet in next to no time with CSS grid.
However, if some zombie has put lots of spans and divs around the form elements and done the labels wrong then you have to choose either to rebuild the backend thing that churns out the form or just style it up lame block layout style.
Pseudo selectors are also cool, there is no need to have silly 'i' elements and spans to put that asterisk after 'required'.
Some people like to keep it simple, doing HTML properly, others want to pootle along with their divs and class attributes. I know what will look good in ten years time and what will look outdated.
HTML5 introduced many features but the main course was the semantic elements. You can and you should write web pages with these elements and also be thinking in terms of them.
You may scorn the accessibility aspect but accessibility is easy if you use the right elements. Why would you not want to have it? There is also the mindset that goes with it - the web is for everyone, not just rich, white, English speaking males with perfect eyesight.
The article is spot on and extremely well said. Styling elements rather than make believe classes is particularly well said.
I would say that people who create div soup HTML should be banned from the internets, the work practices of overly complicating everything has been going on for too long.
I don't even regard div soup web pages as proper web pages, it is like comparing beige deep-fried processed food with freshly prepared from ingredients food.