On Monday, 16 September 2013 at 16:49:25 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
Now you're arguing that <dd class="param"> is better than <div
class="param">. This is more interesting, and I'd like to get
convinced one way or another.
The difference is the <dd> is part of a list. <div> is just a
division of the webpage.
If you were using a generic program to fetch all the lists on the
page, that could find <dd> better than it could find a <div>.
Such a generic program might be a search engine, a screen reader,
a customized browser, or something like my old improveddoc.d
program. (Though the latter, being custom made for this site,
could just use class names too.)
You lose nothing by using the most applicable tag, and gain the
potential that generic programs will understand your page better.
BTW, you should use as many classes as possible as well. I think
each and every ddoc macro should have its own html class. Even if
you never use them in the css file, they can be useful for third
party analyzer tools. improveddoc.d used a few hacks to
reconstruct some ddoc semantics lost in the old setup - knowing
that <i> was actually a param for instance, so good to see that
fixed.
For my part I prefer the minimal commitment of <div> - just
leave it to the style to decide how to go about things.
The stylesheet has full control of appearance regardless of the
tag. You can make a <dd> look like a rainbow circle with
invisible text on the top of the page if you want to, or make it
plain inline text. Same as <div>, <span>, or (almost*) anything
else.
* browser bugs might come into play but they aren't supposed to.
