Tantek’s markup challenge
19th December 2002
In A Touch of Class, Tantek continues his series of tips on writing better semantic markup and then issues a challenge: find related improvements that can be made to his blog. I couldn’t find anything in the overall structure, but I have a few (admittedly nit-picky) suggestions for his current entries. Firstly, the following line would, in my opinion, be better served with a titled <dfn>
element:
New <strong title="shopping by surfing">shurfing</strong> tool.
Secondly, Tantek frequently uses a combination of a pre
and a code
tag to mark up sections of example code. This works fine, but could potentially be improved by adding a class element hinting at the type of code being displayed, for example:
<pre><code class="css"> p.sidebartext { padding:0 5px 2px; font-size:11px; margin-top:2px } </code></pre>
Finally, Tantek’s use of <a class="local">
to differentiate local and external links introduces (technically) redundant data—the fact that the link is to a local resource is implicit in its URL. This information can even be extracted using CSS3 selectors, as is demonstrated by Stuart’s ingenous article External link icons the CSS way.