Comments on: Nested divs are not evil

By: Antonio Malcolm

Antonio Malcolm — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 08:26:40 +0000

No, they’re certainly not, but I think a lot of developers overlook the fact that class and id attributes can be added to any tag, so an army of nested divs isn’t always necessary and usually isn’t.

By: toast

toast — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 13:42:01 +0000

” quasi-purism will not feed your kids”

is perhaps the greatest thing i have read today…

By: Rob Mientjes

Rob Mientjes — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 09:49:31 +0000

Very right, but excuse me while I continue using minimal markup and descriptive classes and ids ;)

Seriously though. Use them if you need them. Cameron does it neatly, with probably a couple divs more than the usual site. Matters not. It’s still mostly semantic.

By: Bob Aman

Bob Aman — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:10:31 +0000

I tend to agree, although I’ve been meaning to try to find out how hard it would be to write up some javascript code to get the best of both worlds. It ought to be possible to write the page in as semantically correct a manner as possible, and then use an external javascript file to restructure the page for correct layout. Still not ideal, and in practice, might result in FOUC-esque flicker, but since I’m planning on using it mainly for semantically correct drop-shadows on images, I’m not quite so worried about it.

By: Ben Ward

Ben Ward — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 23:27:00 +0000

I think there are a lot of people in the world who treat ‘mark-up utopia’ too seriously. They forget that the web is in a state of transition - web standards in the real world are still new. You can’t do everything with minimal XHTML and CSS (yet - CSS3 might pull it off).

While there are some whose ‘mark-up wankery’ gets rather too personal and should be ignored, I think that those who are rather more reasonable about minimalising mark-up deserve some credit (Anne Van Kesteren is one of the latter, usually). They might not produce captivating designs, but they do offer a lot of free research into producing better mark-up. It’s not the be all and end all of the universe (or at least, I bloody well hope it isn’t), but if it means that in a year’s time we can rewrite a better page that’s more useful to search engines, users, browsers and whathaveyou then all the better (I’m thinking mostly Microformats, really).

Err, but yeah, the ones who are just plain rude about it all (without invitation) could use a slap.

By: marko

marko — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 09:48:07 +0000

Of course, if something can be done without extra divs, the better, but with multi-column layouts it’s sometimes the only solution.

By: ©ime

I must agree with this one. I often found myself in similar position, and tend to not use div’s almost at all. But this article makes sense.

It really is easier to code with div’s and it’s kinda more friendly and adds logic to code, like this is header, this is left column etc…