Semantic Markup Within Plugins is a Big Deal

By Jason - 03-22-05

As I look at these plugins I notice there's a lack of meaning in the markup. For example the headline above was simple enblosed in Bold tags as opposed to headline tags. Semantically correct markup says that headlines are specified as such and tags such as "bold" and "italic" that have no meaning are deprecated in favor of tags that mean something, that describe what they are tagging instead of describing the typographic formatting. In the case of B (bold) replace with "strong" and I (italic) with "em" (emphasis). Just a few high points about sematics/meaningful markup. Read More...

Axing Tables in Favor of Divs/Sematics

By Jason - 03-22-05

You asked about replacing the plugin tables with divs and that's so daggum simple it's hardly worth meantioning:

<div id="plugin_name">plugin content</div>

This would allow the skinner to "get a handle on" this div by using the ID as a starter in the cascade to trickle down to the markup elements used within the plugin's output inside the div.

This is simple enough but there are other things to be considered besides just getting rid of the tables (although this is a GREAT start). There's lots of double breaking used when you could be utilizing meaningful markup such as P for paragraphs or UL/LI for unordered lists etc etc.

Another point of application markup output is going to be from the "wysiwyg" editor looking to be coming in v2. From the screencaps I've seen it looks like htmlarea or somesuch and I'm sure that kicks out some mighty weird/bad/meaningless markup (font tags and everything 1996) Read More...