alt Hacker NewsShameless plug: you might be interested in https://calvinlc.com/p/2026/02/11/everything-is-a-div.html
I need to learn more about web accessibility, but if you completely ignore it (and other sane practices) HTML looks really simple.
I think the design of HTML is just too much. There’s so many tags that don’t do much. It’s like w3c decided that any common thing people use in websites needs a tag. The end result is more and more tags…
Can anyone convince me otherwise? It screams design red-flags to me.
PS: I love the web and think it’s the best platform and future platform we have at the moment. It’s just quirky and loves not breaking old websites!
Replies
Oh that’s great. It’s an opinionated view that focused strictly on the behavior of the tags wrt layout and appearance.
I’ve noticed that discussions of semantic meaning of tags often contain the word “feel.” Nothing wrong with that, taste matters, but it does point to the non-functional goals that are being pursued when people disagree.
<ol> vs <ul> - they are both ordered, because markup is ordered. One gets decorated differently than the other by default. Is the difference semantic or typographical?
lol, you should actually read the HTML spec, there are good explanations of all the elements. The whole point of defining semantics is that elements have meaning independent of their default appearance (or any appearance).
> I need to learn more about web accessibility, but if you completely ignore it (and other sane practices) HTML looks really simple.
Everything looks really simple when you ignore vast amounts of the subject and nuance.
Your rules don't mention keyboard or focus behavior, the only mention of either is the association between <label> and its <input>. <output> does have functionality, it's an HTML-native ARIA live region (that can be associated with a <label>).
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/