[ricardobeat]

> I've never seen anyone create a user interface by writing down the full, semantic markup, and then proceed to create CSS for that

Indeed, not in the past 7-8 years. But we used to do it, and the outcome was great - semantic, accessible and machine-readable HTML was the norm. It’s unfortunate that we lost this in the transition to components.

[9dev]

Is that so? From my memory, most people used tables for layouts, or full-out relied on div tags for everything. At some point, HTML5 brought headers and footers and navs and more, and if anything, that made the situation better since.

But if the working groups continue to pretend HTML is for text documents instead of web applications, things will never get more semantic.

[ricardobeat]

Tables for layout started dying around 2008. Eight years ago is 2016, so there is quite a large period in between.

[troupo]

> But if the working groups continue to pretend HTML is for text documents instead of web applications, things will never get more semantic.

I mean, HTML is and will always forever be a system to display a few pages of text with some images thrown in. And even for that it sucks big time.

Anything standards committees have been throwing at it over the years are just haphazard hacks to make it into something it's not with no coherent goal in mind.

[troupo]

> But we used to do it, and the outcome was great - semantic, accessible and machine-readable HTML was the norm

You know, there are still people alive who lived through this Golden Age of 10 years ago? 20 years ago? And they call bullshit on your statement.

[ricardobeat]

I started in 2004. Spent the years of 2007-2012 writing semantic, standards-compliant html (microformats, the works), css and js. Even my first years at booking.com still had that as a concern. Unless this was all a fever dream…

[troupo]

You were a statistical anomaly then. Very very very few people wrote or understood what semantic HTML is. And very few do now.

To pretend that there was some time when, unlike now, people wrote semantic HTML en masse is silly.

[ricardobeat]

Maybe we simply had significantly different experiences? We were involved in many conferences and can definitely say it wasn’t just us.

Everyone I knew in the field was doing the same, Zeldman / ALA was everyone’s hero, UX, accessibility and standards compliance were the highlights of every project, not tooling or frameworks. Not saying everything was perfect but the focus was clearly different.