Tips on reducing wrapper DIVs?

[dresden_phoenix]

I asked this ina html5 question about the NAV tag a long time ago; but it really would have made more sense if NAV was a LIST of links.

<NAV>
<LI><A href="#"></A></LI>
<LI><A href="#"></A></LI>
<LI><A href="#"></A></LI>
</NAV>


you know someone is going to eventually use it to wrap around a group of paragraphs that have links in them...

<nav>
<p> a long paragraph, blah blaha blah <a href="#">a link</a> blh blah bla</p>
</nav>

and wont that be funny?

I think, however the intended use of NAV was W/O the UL... just NAV wrapped around A tags.

[oddz]

That is how it was in the XHTML 2.0 draft that got the axe. I mean¬ I see why it was been done that way. A Nav may consistent of other elements such as a title. You wouldn't to place that in a list item, so it makes some sense to have the nav element not be a list.

[deathshadow60]

I asked this ina html5 question about the NAV tag a long time ago; but it really would have made more sense if NAV was a LIST of links.

Thing is, there used to be a tag that did exactly that -- MENU. It was deprecated along with DIR as redundant to UL for STRICT... Of course MENU is back now for 5 with some other weird purpose that has to do with lists whatsoever.

I think, however the intended use of NAV was W/O the UL... just NAV wrapped around A tags.

No... Well, not entirely. All these new allegedly semantic tags are not intended to replace ANY of the existing semantic tags.... Look at the examples given in the HTML 5 spec:

<nav>
  <ul>
   <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
   <li><a href="/events">Current Events</a></li>
   ...more...
  </ul>
 </nav>

or worse:

<nav>
 <h1>Navigation</h1>
 <p>You are on my home page. To the north lies <a href="/blog">my
 blog</a>, from whence the sounds of battle can be heard. To the east
 you can see a large mountain, upon which many <a
 href="/school">school papers</a> are littered. Far up thus mountain
 you can spy a little figure who appears to be me, desperately
 scribbling a <a href="/school/thesis">thesis</a>.</p>
 <p>To the west are several exits. One fun-looking exit is labeled <a
 href="http://games.example.com/">"games"</a>. Another more
 boring-looking exit is labeled <a
 href="http://isp.example.net/">ISP™</a>.</p>
 <p>To the south lies a dark and dank <a href="/about">contacts
 page</a>. Cobwebs cover its disused entrance, and at one point you
 see a rat run quickly out of the page.</p>
</nav>

It's like the article element or header (check the same page for this example)

<article>
 <header>
  <h1>The Very First Rule of Life</h1>
  <p><time pubdate datetime="2009-10-09T14:28-08:00"></time></p>
 </header>
 <p>If there's a microphone anywhere near you, assume it's hot and
 sending whatever you're saying to the world. Seriously.</p>
 <p>...</p>
 <footer>
  <a href="?comments=1">Show comments...</a>
 </footer>
</article>

Extra wrappers that 99% of the time serve no good purpose. I particularly like the date being formatted as a paragraph for no good reason, the lack of content on the time element, etc, etc...

Or worse:

<article>
 <header>
  <h1>The Very First Rule of Life</h1>
  <p><time pubdate datetime="2009-10-09T14:28-08:00"></time></p>
 </header>
 <p>If there's a microphone anywhere near you, assume it's hot and
 sending whatever you're saying to the world. Seriously.</p>
 <p>...</p>
 <section>
  <h1>Comments</h1>
  <article>
   <footer>
    <p>Posted by: George Washington</p>
    <p><time pubdate datetime="2009-10-10T19:10-08:00"></time></p>
   </footer>
   <p>Yeah! Especially when talking about your lobbyist friends!</p>
  </article>
  <article>
   <footer>
    <p>Posted by: George Hammond</p>
    <p><time pubdate datetime="2009-10-10T19:15-08:00"></time></p>
   </footer>
   <p>Hey, you have the same first name as me.</p>
  </article>
 </section>
</article>

Which plays to what I was saying about "thanks to the section and header tags, let's make EVERYTHING a H1" -- at which point why even bother keeping the numbered heading tags in the first place? Because of course making everything the same level heading makes it SO CLEAR the document structure.

For those of you from outside New England, the part in italics above is called sarcasm. When it comes to heading tags, it's like rather than trying to get people to understand how they work or bothering to clearly define their purpose in English instead of legalese, they're just giving up and saying "oh well, go ahead and vomit it up any old way"

HEADER in particular bothers me because IMHO it's redundant to the numbered headings -- which with the numbered headings reduced to only ever using h1.... Gah, who the **** thinks this is a good idea or even a rational choice?

Though I suspect I know where you got the idea that it should just be anchors inside it -- which is NOT semantic markup even in HTML 5. That oh so wonderful web-rot hell that's been giving bad coding advice for over a decade and a half that people THINK has something to do with the W3C because it starts with W3, when it is COMPLETELY unrelated. You know, the disastrously bad nube-bait?

Pretty much, at this point in the game you can assume anything on W3Schools so far as HTML is concerned is wrong. ESPECIALLY their new HTML 5 stuff that even contradicts the spec in places. Though I've begun to suspect the people endorsing it's use, promoting it's use, writing online tutorials about it, or releasing books on the subject (like that new SitePoint one) have either failed to read the HTML 5 specification, or simply failed to comprehend it.... as IMHO anyone with two brain cells to rub together who does so should be responding with a rather long string of expletives -- or at the very least a handful of negative interjections.

Interjections (Aw!) show excitement (Darn!) or emotion (Hurray!).
They're generally set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point,
Or by a comma when the feeling's not as strong.

So when you're happy (Hurray!) or sad (Aw!)
Or frightened (Eeeeeek!) or mad (Rats!)
Or excited (Wow!) or glad (Hey!)
An interjection starts a sentence right.

[deathshadow60]

Though I've begun to suspect the people endorsing it's use, promoting it's use, writing online tutorials about it, or releasing books on the subject (like that new SitePoint one) have either failed to read the HTML 5 specification, or simply failed to comprehend it...

Not to quote myself, but was past the edit limit.
I think I may know why there's so much misunderstanding the 5 specs, it could have something to do with the 5.4 megabyte page size for 2.3 megabytes of plaintext.

Lands sake brake that mess up into sub-pages... it's damned near unusable in it's current form.

Of course if you need 5 megabytes -- Larger than the King James Bible -- to explain a markup specification... It's time to throw that idiocy in the trash.