> As a reader, I don't want page authors to start hard coding sizes into these elements, because then they'll be more likely to choose non-default values to make their page stand out a bit more.
That ship has already sailed. Whether they do it inline or through CSS, no one cares about the defaults, or your defaults. "Standing out" has been by far the biggest factor in web design ever since there was a web, and continues to drive the development of web technologies - that's because most websites are marketing products, either entirely, or in non-functional aspects (branding).
> HTML is about semantic markup, not visual markup.
Hard disagree here. HTML is too low-level to be semantic. "Separation of content and presentation" is a fundamentally flawed idea, because in many cases presentation is core to the semantics, and this is especially true for the Web, as in marketing, presentation is the content.
I remember the times when the CSS Zen Garden appeared, and everyone went on to meditate there and get high on the "separation of concerns" fumes emitted by the stylesheet selector widget. It was a great trip, but like with all such experiences, the effects are transient and don't carry to the adult reality.
Still, many a webdev tried to hold on to this ideal, many still do today. The results speak for themselves. What does "semantic HMTL" look like? A thick soup of nested divs with more or less meaningful class names, that only loosely resembles the natural structure of the content, because it's written specifically for its companion stylesheets, and only looks well with those particular stylesheets.
Here's a thought many still don't seem to realize: "semantics" in HTML isn't just about tag names, it's also about the shape of your tree. Your document isn't purely semantic, when the entire structure of the document is determined by needs of a specific presentation.
</rant>
You do have a good point about blockquotes. It's one of my main annoyances with markup / outliner formats used in many applications: they treat headline levels as absolute instead of relative, which doesn't play well with attempts at nesting documents inside documents.
In fact, to the extent HTML elements are supposed to be semantic, we shouldn't have headline levels in the first place! Instead of <h1>, <h2>, ... we should just have <header> - the headline level is implicit in the nesting anyway, and it naturally supports quoting/embedding documents in documents (and arbitrarily deep). As they are, <hN> are predominantly about presentation.
Same applies to Microsoft Word, too - the decision to have explicit named styles for headings (1 thru 9) as well as lists and others, causes problems more often than one would expect - at least for the few of us who insist on styling the document semantically, instead of applying specific looks to text by hand like most people do.
> "Standing out" has been by far the biggest factor in web design ever since there was a web,
I don't think that's true or at least as strongly as you suggest. When Bootstrap first came along, all websites that used it clearly looked the same, with minor differences. We see the same today but instead of Bootstrap, people use Tailwind or other libraries/frameworks but the effect is the same, most landing pages look the same, even if the images have different colors.
Most websites today look like each other one way or another, as they're all mostly using the same libraries and frameworks that kind of pushes people into specific approaches. Very different from the web in the 90s/early 00s, where every website worked and looked very different from each other.
> When Bootstrap first came along, all websites that used it clearly looked the same, with minor differences. We see the same today but instead of Bootstrap, people use Tailwind or other libraries/frameworks but the effect is the same, most landing pages look the same, even if the images have different colors.
There's a logic to this phenomena, and it involves few people/companies trying something new to stand out (sometimes by being flashy, sometimes by being more ergonomic or less assaulting on the senses), some others following suit, and then if that "sticks", you'll see everyone else adopting the same design too. In particular, when some design reaches enough adoption, people who don't use it start to stand out, negatively - visitors start to see them as quaint, or worse, weird and therefore untrustworthy.
(It's not a bad heuristic, either. You can avoid a lot of Internet scams if you pay attention to how the website comes across to you at a visceral level. It's kind of a "spidey sense" many of us Internet dwellers have :).)
This is not Internet-specific either, it's also a thing in branding and product design spaces in general.
> Most websites today look like each other one way or another, as they're all mostly using the same libraries and frameworks that kind of pushes people into specific approaches.
That applies to products/services. Those tend to stand out subtler, but usually there's still a marketing department having strong influence (if not final say) on the design, and they make sure the branding is clear and the site is still easy to distinguish from any other site built with the same libraries and frameworks.
(The other category of websites is just glorified posters and magazines, and those are much weirder and unique, though even there you'll find fashion trends.)
EDIT:
The more general point is, presentation is always a core concern in commercial software, because branding is a core concern for companies. This has been true even before the Web; I recall some old UI Design Guidelines from Microsoft, IIRC for Windows 95, where this is acknowledged explicitly - the OS is pressured to provide ways to customize look&feel of UI elements, because software vendors demand it for branding, and so we can forget about having uniform UIs between applications. This is the unfortunate reality that drives UI standards.
> In fact, to the extent HTML elements are supposed to be semantic, we shouldn't have headline levels in the first place! Instead of <h1>, <h2>, ... we should just have <header> - the headline level is implicit in the nesting anyway
The <header> vs <h#> decision often ends up being a flow-breaking exception in my development process.
It also bugs me that we have exactly six hardcoded heading levels. Something about that feels like it violates a deep, lizard-brain-level DRY principle.
My main concern is how well screen readers and assistive tech would handle a semantic-only approach, as the <h#> elements go all the way back to the beginning of HTML and are pretty deeply rooted in standard practices.
That ship has already sailed. Whether they do it inline or through CSS, no one cares about the defaults, or your defaults. "Standing out" has been by far the biggest factor in web design ever since there was a web, and continues to drive the development of web technologies - that's because most websites are marketing products, either entirely, or in non-functional aspects (branding).
> HTML is about semantic markup, not visual markup.
Hard disagree here. HTML is too low-level to be semantic. "Separation of content and presentation" is a fundamentally flawed idea, because in many cases presentation is core to the semantics, and this is especially true for the Web, as in marketing, presentation is the content.
I remember the times when the CSS Zen Garden appeared, and everyone went on to meditate there and get high on the "separation of concerns" fumes emitted by the stylesheet selector widget. It was a great trip, but like with all such experiences, the effects are transient and don't carry to the adult reality.
Still, many a webdev tried to hold on to this ideal, many still do today. The results speak for themselves. What does "semantic HMTL" look like? A thick soup of nested divs with more or less meaningful class names, that only loosely resembles the natural structure of the content, because it's written specifically for its companion stylesheets, and only looks well with those particular stylesheets.
Here's a thought many still don't seem to realize: "semantics" in HTML isn't just about tag names, it's also about the shape of your tree. Your document isn't purely semantic, when the entire structure of the document is determined by needs of a specific presentation.
</rant>
You do have a good point about blockquotes. It's one of my main annoyances with markup / outliner formats used in many applications: they treat headline levels as absolute instead of relative, which doesn't play well with attempts at nesting documents inside documents.
In fact, to the extent HTML elements are supposed to be semantic, we shouldn't have headline levels in the first place! Instead of <h1>, <h2>, ... we should just have <header> - the headline level is implicit in the nesting anyway, and it naturally supports quoting/embedding documents in documents (and arbitrarily deep). As they are, <hN> are predominantly about presentation.
Same applies to Microsoft Word, too - the decision to have explicit named styles for headings (1 thru 9) as well as lists and others, causes problems more often than one would expect - at least for the few of us who insist on styling the document semantically, instead of applying specific looks to text by hand like most people do.