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The idea behind "info-contact" is that it could potentially be a standard set of contact info that could be repurposed and processed.Originally Posted by r937
This, IMHO seems to be the right idea.
However, literally you are correct and I should have been more careful with my words, a <div> with no context is the equivalent to "gobbledeegook" (what a fun word), meaning it conveys nothing.
To be more specific, <div id="footer"> is not semantic because the identifier of the division element supplies a positional aspect and thus is not a contextual (semantic) identifier.nice one, wozbk, thanks
so, can we finally put the topic of this thread to rest?
yes, <div id="footer"> is not semantic
It's still in grey area though because the word footer define's a position but at the same time also a function (And thus it's contents), because people know what information you will generally find in a footer.
A "footer" is still rather generic and ambiguous, but I agree with your point that we all have come to consider that the same general kinds of data are in a footer.
Perhaps there should be an <f1> tag like there are <h1> tags (and so on). Nonetheless, why not be more specific and descriptive than "footer" with the id or class, if the data calls for it. If there was some agreed upon, documented standard as to what comprised a "footer" then it would be different - I am not opposed to that in any way - just trying to use and interpret the standards properly.
Is it semantic?
Does it really matter???
Is an apple better than an orange, discuss.
Dr John
www.kidneydialysis.org.uk
Why do we care? if you're building websites it's nice to have clearly defined building blocks and rules that tell you how to use them. With the help of rules, standards and semantics we can build websites that look good now and in the future, that is, if the browsers will follow the rules too.
Don't be ridiculous. Data that is machine readable is so because the machine was taught how to understand and interpret the language said data is written in; not because the data or language has something inherent about it that machines can understand on their own.
No portion of any language, human, machine, or otherwise, is entirely "self-describing"; nothing can completely describe itself. Meaning of words in a language is only fully understood through relation and context to other words in the language. The meaning of the color "red" is only understood through understanding of other colors or understanding of frequency. At the most basic level in machine language, a 0 is only understood through understanding a 1, and vise-versa; the presence of a electronic signal can only be fully understood through the absence of the signal. In HTML, a header tag is only understood through understanding the other header tags. An H1 tag does not fully describe its meaning on its own. That meaning is only gained when you -- whether human or machine -- understand the other header tags and its relation to them. And on and on it goes...
But we have no idea what data it contains, so we can definitively say nothing about the relation of the div, its id, and its contents. The id may describe position or it may not; it may describe the contents. Without knowledge of said contents, we simply cannot know the relationship. To pretend that we do is presumptuous.
A footer isn't the visual position, it's the position in the document. A document starts with a header, the main body, and then the footer. I don't understand how that's about layout.
Similarly, each section starts with a heading. So the heading is at the top of the section. Therefore headings are about layout? That makes no sense.
Simon Pieters
we know what a footer is, but there is nothing that tells a machine what that means
please see post #49 again
Not true. They do give special meaning based on id value. For a user agent to conform to the XHTML specification, it dictates that they must parse the id attribute of elements as the fragment identifier. This gives that particular XHTML Object an extra meaning to the machine that other like Objects do not have. Specifically, the machine interprets and understands the Object as also being a specific document sub-resource in addition to being the XHTML Object it is.
I didn't read this all the way through but I feel the div is semantic because the div is an html element while the id is for the use of other things. So the id does not affect the element in that you can remove the id and the html will still display correctly.
I would believe it is semantic... If someone knew what a footer was, and a div, I believe they could figure out what was going to go in there.
- Follow the dancing banana
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