27.10.2011 3:11, Ashley Sheridan wrote:
Try telling me Google isn't aware of HTML5 in web pages and I'll laugh.
OK, I'll try: Google does not care about new HTML5 elements. Do you feel amused now?
Can you please now do me, and others, a favor and give some evidence of actual Google behavior in this respect? If it's something that we need to be aware of, it should be observable from outside Google, i.e. when using Google, not just in their internal code that is not public. So which effects can we observe?
(This would be interesting in its own account, even though it does not prove that new _elements_ were needed for that. But it would give some perspective regarding the eagerness to add and promote new elements.)
- - you shouldn't use attributes to determine the meaning of the content.
That sounds like a prejudice based on the introduction of many presentational attributes in HTML 3.2 and their preservation in later versions. It does not in any way mean that attributes as such are presentational and not semantic.
HTML5 tries hard to distinguish between <table> indicating tabular data and <table> being used merely as layout tool - and the distinction is largely based on the use of attributes in the <table> element and its descendants. It is certainly wise to keep <table> as dual (tabular data vs. layout) for compatibility, instead of introducing new elements to distinguish them - no matter how logical or semantic such an idea might sound. Using attributes in <div> to indicate navigational areas, articles, etc., would similarly be useful for compatibility and would be much clearer and more logical, as the meaning would be uniquely defined by a single attribute - not by some rather messy rules involving several elements and attributes.
-- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
