Maybe this is an incorrect philosophy when approaching (X)HTML, but I
always look at things in a more meaningful way when approaching "semantics".
If you were to ask an english major and a w3c specs author to define a
paragraph, you'd get to very different answers, wouldn't you? I feel
that as a web developer, its my job to marry those two worlds. I take
boring (X)HTML documents, add a visual flavor to them in the hopes that
both the machine and human can interact with the information painlessly.
Examples? Consider the news entry. News entries are viewed in two ways
- list format (summaries) and detail format. Each format would require
different markup in my opinion.
The list view could be coded as:
<dl>
<dt>My Headline</dt>
<dd>Date</dd>
<dd>Article Summary</dd>
<dd>Link</dd>
</dl>
I would opt to use an individual <dl> for each entry. Many here would
argue this approach for one reason or another. However, a machine can
interpret this inforamtion quite well, since it understands the
"relationships" that the <dl> implies.
For the detail view I would:
<h*>My Headline</h*>
<p>Date, Category, Author etc</p>
<p>Article with multiple <p>'s and whatever else</p>
Again, in this format seems to outline the relationship of the
informations best in this scenario.
For me, when I'm coding pages I always make the unstyled boring document
first. If that document looks the way it should naked, I know that I'm
headed in the right direction.
I don't nest other tags inside <dt>'s or <dd>'d unless they are inline
elements (img, a, span etc). I feel they should be individual units,
just like <th>'s and <td>'s though many would argue this as well.
The specs are what they are, they're not perfect, nor is the markup they
describe. You want to subscribe to their recommended best practices,
but the specs need to be looked at subjectively. They were written by
people who are striving to create the most generic descriptions they can
(while accurately techniquely describing the intentions) of something
they didn't create in the first place.
It's like the bible, if you're a christian you want to respect the
official rules, but you don't want to over analyze the book word for
word, as again, it was written by people who may not exactly understand
the original intended purpose exactly....
My two cents,
Joe Taylor
http://sitesbyjoe.com
Barney Carroll wrote:
I somehow got the impression p stood for phrase... (?!)
Mariusz Nowak wrote:
Anyway I wonder how it really should be treated.. (I'm not 100%
positive that my approach is right) or maybe both way are
semantically valid to treat p as I do and more strictly as you do..
However due to lack of clear statement on it in w3c specs I doubt
that there is a clear answer for that.
Regards,
Barney Carroll
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Joseph R. B. Taylor
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