Andy Clarke has left a nice reminder for people to think when they [URL=http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/semantics_and_design.html]seperate too much into the CSS[/url].
He talks about code semantics, and being careful of removing meaning from code, in order to use CSS to style it instead.

His main example of often styling the first paragraph of a section to highlight it is good. If you want to highlight content like that, it should be highlighted whether the CSS is rendered or not. There should be some integral part of the markup saying “this content is a bit more important”.

One of my more popular articles, [URL=http://www.camaban.co.uk/rants/semantic-what/]Semantic what?[/url], discusses some of these kinds of issues, though I’d never thought of going quite as far as Andy points out.

I also realise I wrote that nearly 3 years ago, it’s good to have reminders like that every so often, the “styling goes in the CSS” rule is fine, but you have to consider whether something is purely style, or is itmore than that.

I’m also interested in his “Design is Meaning” comment, near the end, and I’m looking forward to reading more on his thoughts.
I can see where he’s coming from, different types of sites have fundamentally different goals, but I kind of wonder if the HTML of a site should ‘look’ corporate like, or ‘look’ fun and friendly.
I’m not convinced, because you could also design a site to have quite a corporate feel, but later they want to soften that a bit. If some of that is hard coded into the HTML, it could be a lot harder to do.

The big thing about CSS is being able to take semantic markup and style it in different ways to suits different styles.

I’ll be very interested too see what he thinks about it, and how he argues the case though.

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