element?
I took a web design course a couple of years ago. I had taken a web architecture course the semester before, but I didn't feel like I had really mastered the process of building a site. And besides, it was being taught by impressive Berkeley undergraduates with awesome internship experiences and shiny computer science degrees. In a word, I knew that this course was going to be awesome.You can probably only imagine my shock when I opened the first or second assignment and saw a document littered with tags. There were paragraphs of text, but not a tag in sight. There was a header, but they neglected to use
. Instead, we had to style everything look like the default HTML elements.It may be an understatement to say I was appalled. All of my prior training in that web architecture course had taught me that HTML is meant to be semantic. You write your HTML for humans, not machines; when somebody looks at the document, they should be able to understand what the structure of the document is just by the tags.The document is, naturally, marked up.So, yes. You can write a page with no divs, and most modern browsers will happily render it properly. However, when somebody has to go in and modify your code, they might be very frustrated that they can't get a sense of how the document is rendered. People using screen readers will almost certainly run into issues, as well. And finally, you’ll make pedantic nerds like me very sad when I see your code.NOTE: I’m definitely speaking more about complex applications and pages; of course we could talk about a simple “Hello world” page with no tags besides HTML and body, but that case is trivial.