Earlier I made a comment as to the problem with the term HTML semantics claiming that none presentational elements would make the term redundant. I also posited elements such as div and span which are considered non- semantics my are in fact semantics in the sense of meaningful.

Apr 27, 2022 · 1:35 PM UTC

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What more should be said about this and it's a discussion we don't have a lot. Semantics is thought of by most people as the study of meaning of language. Semantics also includes semiotics and pragmatics but we are not giving this backgrounds when we study language for the web.
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We claim the strong elements is semantic because it has meaning. So that would imply the B element has no meaning. Both have meaning! Just different meaning. Semantic markup isn't defining our ideation rather the significance or presentation of content.
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What's more those meanings weather semantic or presentational has far less to do about what we think meaning is but what the user agent does with that content. We can argue that HTML is not semantic when presentational but that would not align to certain theories within the field
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So what is really important about what we call semantic HTML? It really boils down to accessibility. By describing to a user agent not the presentation but the definition of a given element that elements now becomes easy to convey in all kinds of different meaningful ways.
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When we talk about semantic HTML let's be clear it is a new branch of semantics that includes other semantic theories and that its role is to convey content to adaptive technology first and then to humans after it has been interpreted. Thank you for reading along! #100DaysOfCode
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Replying to @mholzschlag
Tags like <div>,<span> mostly are claiming to be as non-semantics, but semantics tags like <header> <article> have also no affect to content and accessibility at all. So maybe all HTML tags can be claiming as semantics?
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Yes all tags are semantics technically speaking in terms of semantic theories of which there are many
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more replies
Replying to @mholzschlag
OASIS's Robin Cover collected well over 400 XML vocabularies before giving up. No one document description could sensibly organize the breadth of human sense of meaning. IMO we must work with HTML DNA's tortured history of gene splicing, congenital defects, and ambiguity.
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It doesn't make them lexical a semantic it's still semantics Christian it's just an expanded Fury beyond what people think of when they apply the term semantics to the World Wide Web at all. Linguistics and semantics are very complex, theoretical, definitively at odds at times.