Have you ever wondered how HTML5 element names were decided?
Maybe not, but I bet you’re wondering now!
Lee Munroe attended a talk by Chris Mills, creator of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, and he talked about HTML5 and the research behind how the HTML5 element names came about.
Google did some research. This only adds to my theory of Google overtaking the world via the world wide web, but I digress.
Google looked at about a billion web pages and measured what ID and class names were used the most.
This is what they found:
Google wasn’t the only contributor (there goes my theory). Opera conducted their own research as well:
You can see the similarities. Here are Opera’s results for IDs:
So, that’s how the element names were decided. The most commonly used IDs and classes used by web designers were selected.
Both ‘main’ and ‘content’ are the obvious omissions. I’m not 100% behind the reasoning for this but I guess ‘section’ and ‘article’ work better semantically for the main content areas.
To me, this stresses the importance and power of the designing and coding community. You developed HTML5 without even knowing it. Everyone contributed. You could call it “Cloud Coding.”
This is why I think the web dev community should give IE6 the shaft and ignore it. If everyone ignored it, it would completely disappear.
[via Lee Munroe]
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