Josh Kinal those new HTML 5 ALLEGEDLY semantic elements are nothing more than code bloat, pointless redundancies, and undoing twenty years of progress to satiate the wants and desires of the people who still vomit up HTML 3.2 and spent two decades calling it 4 tranny.

It adds nothing of value from an accessibility or usability standpoint. SECTION is redundant to what numbered headings and HR do. MAIN is redundant to the first H2 or HR on a well written page. NAV is redundant to the first H2 or HR on a well written page or even what an anchor tag means, since all it’s really for is to mark a section for skipping and saying “this is navigation”. EVERY anchor is flipping navigation. ARTICLE seems to just be thrown around everything except actual articles, people seem to throw FIG and FIGCAPTION at everything except mathematical and/or scientific figures, HEADING is either meaningless or redundant to existing numbered headings, the FOOTER distinction doesn’t fit the writing norms semantic markup is supposed to be based on, etc, etc, etc.

They reek of the fact that the WhatWG clearly never embraced 4 Strict or semantics — and to be frank were utterly unqualified to make HTML 4 Strict’s successor from that standpoint. Particularly in terms of adding new tags for NOTHING of value, introducing redundancies 4 STRICT was trying to get rid of (AUDIO, VIDEO, EMBED much?)…

… and that level of them not understanding it can be proven with one simple tag (for simpletons) that was stricken pretty much an eyeblink after the W3C accepted their version: HGROUP. A tag that never should have existed, served ZERO legitimate semantic purpose, and only allowed for something that was semantic gibberish; pairing two headings of different levels for a heading and tagline… news flash, that’s all one heading and the second one is NOT starting a new subsection of the page.

Hence why SECTION pisses on the numbered heading structural rules and I’ve yet to encounter a single legitimate accessibility UA that obeys it properly.

So much of it just reeks of the meddling of “data scrapers” — or to use their proper name, CONTENT THIEVES. Aka the people you usually want to keep out of your website.

Also, don’t point at W3Fools for reference, those sleazy dirtbags tricking people with the misleading name, with pages reeking top to bottom of web rot and disinformation has never done anyone any favors. Just look at the halfwitted mental enfeeblement that is their “W3.CSS” framework for everything you need to know about them and how they have zero business instructing anyone on how to use HTML or CSS.

Since if you don’t know what’s wrong with saying class=”w3-red w3-border-left w3-right-align w3-large” it’s time to back away from the keyboard and go take up something a bit less detail oriented like macramé.

I’m still shocked how many people think the duplicitous underhanded scam artists at W3Schools have anything to do with the W3C. But then it did take a decade and a half and a parody website to get them to even put up a disclaimer that no, they’re not associated… buried on their about page.