So last night (it was late), there were a bunch of us sitting around after class just talking (we were rather loopy since we’d been sitting at the same table all day). At one point the conversation steers towards the <div> tag, Jon sketches up a sad faced <div> tag and proudly displays it to the rest of us. We all start laughing and a minute later, Jesse comes up with a funny idea for a site, deathofthediv.com.
We all laughed and thought nothing of it, then Jesse buys the domain and issues a proclamation : “Let’s put Jon’s picture up on the site, have terrible music playing and have a place where people can leave their condolences! I have 30 minutes, let’s make this site in 30 minutes and we can’t use any div tags!”
So we get to work. Jon writes up the copy, RJ finds the music, Jesse starts coding up the site, Fouhy makes a background (which we didn’t up using) and I put together the facebook comments app, analytics and favicon.
30 minutes later, this was the result!
Already, there has been a stir about whether or not the div tag is dead or even dying…
It’s my opinion that the div tag is not actually on it’s way out. In fact I think the div will remain a staple of the web development community for at least a couple more years. However, I don’t think it can be contested that with the introduction of HTML5 elements, the div tag is no longer necessary or relevant as the “most used” semantic element. The Death of the div to me, represents a shift in usage from a “go to” element for semantic markup to “peripheral” in its use and usefulness. Already I can see section and article tags being much more useful/clean. However, there’s nothing like a good wrap from the div.
Weigh in at: deathofthediv.com!
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