Three Dollar Quill

In this post:

• I trash Semantic UI's documentation a bunch.
• I redid the theme.
• Oh, huh, my site doesn't have valid HTML.

At work, the main project I'm on is using Semantic UI. This was not my decision. I keep on bouncing off the documentation when I try to read it, though I think I basically understand the concepts now. One barrier to my reading the documentation is its tendency to give examples like <div class="ui button">, a construction that strikes me as akin to putting a sticky note that says "food" on a brick, and calling that cooking. I think supporting UI automation code for years might have given me a hardline stance on this kind of thing. Anyway, the other issue is that, while I'm bouncing off the documentation, I'm also rolling around in my head a quote from the front page: "Get the same benefits as BEM or SMACSS, but without the tedium." and thinking wistfully about working on this blog's theme. I don't know what BEM-related tedium they're talking about.

All of this is to say that I was reading up background material on Semantic, and I ended up looking at the generated source for one of the pages on the site. From reading up on Semantic, I came to the conclusion that I should probably be using em or rem in my theme, so that's why everything looks a little different as of earlier today. The other thing I noticed was that my generated html had some errors, which I will sum up thus:

• The <span> tag does not work that way, apparently. I figured, since I had nothing to put in it, I could just self-close it, and, nope. Got to give it an open and a close.
• Sublime Text decided to """help""" me by adding an extra quote mark after some template stuff that was generating an HTML attribute.

While I'm thinking about this, I plugged the site into the W3C validator. It tossed up some warnings. I'll see about fixing those.

...

In the end, I was able to fix the lang attribute being broken on most pages. There's also some stuff about the contents of the <header> elements that I'm not sure is a problem per se, and also the generated code is using some obsolete HTML, which, goddammit, I trusted whichever component is messing this up. I trusted it!

So, there's more work to be done on this stuff, but it's Friday night and I want to wind down. Final thought on Semantic UI's front page: I really feel like bringing up BEM and SMACSS is a tactical misstep, because Semantic UI seems to me like a different kind of thing from BEM and probably SMACSS. So, while I'm hitting the docs at random trying to find stuff, I keep on having to fend off the incorrect idea that I could just replace Semantic UI with BEM. After all, Semantic UI itself set them up as competing technologies. But this is absurd; Semantic UI is a framework, and BEM is a set of naming conventions. Also, I still don't know when the tedium of using BEM is supposed to hit.

Next post, I guess I should try to make some of those interpreter changes I mentioned.