>I mean, semantics are also good! Yes, CSS grids are a lot like tables in some ways, but not having to add 25% more DOM elements to fake a table layout (display: table/table-row/table-cell; that's 3 divs for one row!) is also a thing to be celebrated.
Semantics in the context of CSS is a stupid idea web designers came up with. They heard the concept of "semantic", and had to fit it in, to appear smart. Should have asked actual developers.
(the so-called "semantic web" was another such failed idea dragged on for an eternity for research grands. Remember RDF? What fun!)
The semantics is not the job for HTML, which is the final artifact for display, and not a data interchange format, nor the format you store your info as. So there's no need for it to be semantically clean and "parsable/reusable" (to do what? web-scrap it? As for screen-readers, there are official metadata annotations for those - not to mention they wouldn't know to do anything special for each ad-hoc different "semantic" tag soup people come up with with the severely limited for that reason HTML5 tags, or worse divs).
The semantics belong to whatever backend and metadata you have your content in, before it gets rendered as HTML.
And if you need to also give it to users in parsable/reusable form, allow them to query a JSON (or structured) version.
Yeah, it's a joke. You can't take "HTML semantics" seriously when you often depend on actual element position IN THE HTML CODE to make things work, specially when modern web design demands elements to just JUMP AROUND all over the page when the width changes.
If they really wanted semantics you would think there would be actual support for that.
By the way, I've asked this question here some other day, but nobody has any idea if most "semantic" tags are being used for anything at all (and Wordpress naturally uses all of them wrong, so there is no point even bothering).
There's not much software that takes semantic HTML as input, because barely anyone writes semantically-valid HTML. It's a vicious cycle. (Look upon the parsing rules for a high-quality screen reader, and weep.)
No point making a semantic web browser before we get a semantic WYSIWYM HTML editor. Maybe those could be the same program, like in olden times?
Semantics in the context of CSS is a stupid idea web designers came up with. They heard the concept of "semantic", and had to fit it in, to appear smart. Should have asked actual developers.
(the so-called "semantic web" was another such failed idea dragged on for an eternity for research grands. Remember RDF? What fun!)
The semantics is not the job for HTML, which is the final artifact for display, and not a data interchange format, nor the format you store your info as. So there's no need for it to be semantically clean and "parsable/reusable" (to do what? web-scrap it? As for screen-readers, there are official metadata annotations for those - not to mention they wouldn't know to do anything special for each ad-hoc different "semantic" tag soup people come up with with the severely limited for that reason HTML5 tags, or worse divs).
The semantics belong to whatever backend and metadata you have your content in, before it gets rendered as HTML.
And if you need to also give it to users in parsable/reusable form, allow them to query a JSON (or structured) version.