The 3 principles of (X)HTML designing
Actual is not normal (a tribute to Edward Tufte) by kevindooley
We’ve all heard about the end of XHTML 2 development by the W3C, and about the importance taken by (X)HTML 5. But what does this implies on our task of designing websites ? — which is clearly based upon W3C’s standards —
In order to answer this question, we need to recall how we work — and have to — actually. The dominant thought until now was to separate content and presentation, using (X)HTML to reinforce the semantics of our content, and CSS to create the layout.
But this thought had become a dogma. The dogma of semantic web. Of course, semantic is important in our work-flow, but by putting forward semantics I think we forgot one of the — maybe the one — most important principles of (X)HTML. And I think that this is the reason why W3C just finished XHTML2 development.
The role of (X)HTML is to serve the structure of our content. This is now clearly visible by the add of article and section and so on tags in (X)HTML 5 : the structure is becoming again the base of (X)HTML designing.
Principle 1 :
(X)HTML is used to express the structure of the document.
Of course, semantics is important. And I think that integration of structure into mark-up is the best solution for the divitis problem : indeed, thus we don’t have to integrate more and more non-semantic classes such as footer, header, etc. And we can use @class and @id to really integrate semantics into the content.
Principle 2 :
Semantics has to be expressed by attributes like @class or @id — and maybe by XML extensions like RDFa —
CSS has is role, and no other one : create the layout of document using (X)HTML structure. I don’t think we need to say more about this here. This is well-known.
Principle 3 :
The layout is created by CSS style-sheets.
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