rob blog.

This post concerns a tweet that I made earlier today. While reading though Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp’s “Introducing HTML5″ I began to wonder, “are the barriers to entry for HTML rising for beginners?”

<section> ,<article>, and the semantic web

If I’m understanding correctly, one of the more compelling aims of the spec, is to create more semantic markup. This doesn’t seem like such a big deal — until we actually begin to write html5 markup.

With the new spec we are left to determine where it’s appropriate to place <section> and <article> tags, which are only two tags amongst a great number, with only semantic meanings. When does an html5 author use an <aside> tag in every instance? Because language often disobeys it’s own rules, these semantic tags leave me to think that it makes html less friendly to the beginner. In prior versions you have a <div> and a <class> for your structural elements. You take those and do what you will with them. Although, with the new spec, we’re left to explain to beginners, many of which are off the bat intimidated by technology in many cases, that there are ‘correct’ ways to semantically author things, which have little real bearing on the outcome of the functionality of the page.

I’m as excited as anyone else about the new APIs available in the new spec. Drag and drop, canvas, it’s all really exciting. I just feel for the eager beginner who has to stress over the correct semantic meaning of markup, then realizing that Oh, crap! What’s an API. Oh crap again! What is Javascript?.

One attractive thing about program languages to beginners, is that for a time, it’s all pretty inclusive.You want to write some Python? You open your text editor and write some. On the web, there’s a whole mess of interconnected stuff you have to mess to wrap your head around. HTML used to be the easiest place to start. Now, I’m not so sure.

Tags: beginners, html5