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Comment by UncleCarbs | Hacker News Reader

Very pretty, but is it really semantic? "A button can have different sizes. A button can have different colors." </soapbox>

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I'm more surprised that the button is defined using a <div> tag instead of a <button> one. http://semantic-ui.com/elements/button.html A lot of these elements seem to be using div tags instead of list, button, ...

“Semantic is tag agnostic, meaning you can use any html tags with UI elements.”

It's unfortunate that they chose to use un-semantic tags in all their examples. It's almost backwards. Other than that, it's extremely well documented and a pleasure to work with, and much easier to pick up than Bootstrap these days.

So is it the obvious usability fail that this statement would seem?

I believe last time this was discussed it was broadly agreed that the framework isn't semantic, it's Semantic. I.e. it's just the name of the framework. Of course, it's incredibly misleading ...

Author here, semantic doesn't refer to the misappropriation of the word "semantic" by developers as "adherence to W3C specification", but instead a reference to linguistic semantics, particularly Montague grammar and compositionality.

This is not a topic that you can very easily introduce, so mostly I prefer to convince others of the library's usefulness rather than getting into a philosophical debate nobody enjoys (or benefits from) about 'the nature of meaning'.

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