[Wsuug] Special snowflakes, just like everybody else

[Kelley Walker]

Has anyone else read Andy Clarke's latest, _Transcendent
CSS_? I really enjoyed it, though I had quibbles with the
book design/page layout.

Be that as it may, what enthused me about the book was
Clarke's case for developing sites from the "content-out."
You start with the bare bones content as a *content*
problem, not a design problem. Clarke is, of course, big on
semantic mark-up and microformats. 

His informal survey of web design colleagues revealed a
variety of ways to name what typically contains a site's
logo or branding: masthead, head, header, etc. Where site
information is usually contained (address, company name,
links to about us pages, pr pages, copyright, contact info,
developers usually name the area "footer" -- yet the name
has nothing to do with the content.

Few named it what is was in a way that was not dependent on
presentational naming conventions: header, mashthead, head,
footer, sidebar, leftrail, firstcolumn, etc. All of these
are presentational names that have nothing to do with the
*content*.

OK. I'm all for what he's saying. But what nagged is this:
knowing myself and others, I can't imagine unique little
snowflake developers/designers are going to jump on the
bandwagon and name things according to a standard. I agree
it would be nice, fantabulous even, but every time I talk to
someone about Clarke's book, the naming thing..., you can
see the hesitation: "You mean I have to name it branding and
not header? Siteinfo and not footer? Waaaaaah."

Personally, I'm all for convention because it removes a
piece of the work: I don't have to think about the best
naming convention.

What's your experience with semantic markup and naming? Is
there a way around the snowflake problem? Or do you think
it's not really a problem?

As a related question, at Clarke's site, I noticed he has a
sample page up,
http://forabeautifulweb.com/demo/2008/09/21/index.html.

What stumped me was why Clarke decided that the group of
logos (flickr, facebook, youtube) was semantically
considered a paragraph and not a list.

Thoughts?

Kelley