Death To The Div

You can achieve the same effect now using XHTML namespaces. I defined <question:required>, <question:optional>, <question:subquestion>, <answer:trigger> tags when working on a dynamic survey application I did that would hide or display followup questions based on answers to previous questions.

Yes! I've always thought that HTML should be more like XML in that arbitrary tags should possess little presentational meaning without an associated stylesheet. Perhaps we'll call this new concoction... HXTML!

I like this thought, but I'm not going to suggest that I can see all the ramifications and which ones we'd all end up hating in 10 years.

I'm probably wrong, but isn't this exactly what XSLT does? You define your custom tags and document structure in xml and then apply the visual styles with xsl?

I agree 100%.<p>This would make it a lot easier to edit pages with tricky navigation divs. It would help in many other places too.<p>I always thought that was (on of) the <i>point</i> of css, with display essentially defining what a tag was.

You can also achieve the same effect using XML and XSLT.<p>[edit]^ beaten by the few minutes it took me to log in! Great minds et al.

Lispers had this for ages too; CL-WHO lets me define my own tags and define what to translate them to, divs or spans or whatever.

One problem with allowing arbitrary elements is that the browser won't know whether element &#60;foobar&#62; should display as block, inline, etc. CSS styles would need to be specified accordingly whenever custom elements would be used.

Also interesting to note is that FF3 (and quite possibly older versions) interpret and display custom tags which have been styled using CSS.

i've been thinking about this considerably lately. Isn't this in many ways what facebook has done with FBML? Just created there own tags, and get a javascript to manipulate it?<p>I understand that it is a dtd, but can't you create any element you want and define it's behaviour in a dtd? I'm still just getting into the research on this.

Meh, I don't see the problem with "div soup". The only thing I agree with that's mentioned in the article is that at least you could tell where a specific tag started and ended. But whenever I nest div's more than a few levels deep, I always leave comments in my code for the closing tags to state what specific id/class they are closing. Is that really so hard? No, it's not.<p>Also, as others have mentioned, having made-up tags littered throughout a site's HTML would lead to two problems:<p>- For people learning HTML, you'd have no idea what tags are real and which are make-believe<p>- It would be hard to update the HTML standard in the future without breaking a bunch of sites<p>Both of those are serious problems from my POV.