HTML 5: Questioning “aside”, “header”, and “footer”

Jens Meiert, September 6, 2007 / October 6, 2008.

This entry is filed under Web Development.

There currently still are at least three “strange” elements specified by the HTML 5 draft, namely aside, header, and footer. Now that normality kicks in again in my life, I finally managed to note that again in an email to the Working Group:

I need to bring up the aside, header, and footer elements again, no matter that they’ve been discussed a few times yet. I’m still not convinced that their names are very appropriate as they seem to be too “presentational” and almost meaningless.

I’m very interested in how you judge that and whether more WG members see those as an issue, and beside asking for your pick, I may illustrate the problem by at the same time proposing alternate names and slightly different/complementary semantics like:

auxiliary/aux or supplement instead of aside; quite more generic and probably the most debatable suggestions here, but also less related to the element’s presentation.

identity instead of header; I know that more people gripe when it comes to header and footer (yet with IDs and classes of the same names which seems reasonable to me), and observing people who look for alternatives and also doing a “heuristic analysis” of current use, identity seems to be a descriptive and in many cases sufficient alternative for header.

about instead of footer; again, it’s just a hasty suggestion, but the situation is similar to header, and about already appears to be an improvement, too.

So that’s both news from me and the HTML development. I’m looking forward to professional input; are you with me (and, apparently, Philip), or do you see real arguments for not changing any of those elements?

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On September 20, 2007, 13:44 CEST, Jens Meiert said:

Meanwhile, the discussion became quite interesting (W3C archive) and has also been documented in the wiki.

Jens Meiert

HTML 5: Questioning “aside”, “header”, and “footer”

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