I’m working on a new project, and after reading What’s in a Name, What’s in a Name Part Two and Elemental Nomenclature, I want to try to set up some semantically-relevant ids for the page elements.
In looking at the wireframe I was provided with, I am identifying the major sections and trying to decide how best to name them. Imagine a page where we have a header, main navigation, subnavigation, main content, and then a sidebar of supplementary navigation, not related to the main nav. I am torn between calling it a sidebar (which is presentational) or suppnav (which is content-driven). The fact is, it may change in how it is presented, in which case it would not be on the side, but on the other hand, should we not have some sort of standards of how we display things on the right, be it supplementary nav on this screen, or widgets or pods or whatever on the side of the screen?
I don’t want to add an extra layer of complexity by having a #sidebar (presentational) with a #suppnav (semantic) inside it, although to some extent that does seem to have some merit to it.
What to do, what to do..?
Andrea, you might be interested in taking a look at http://webpatterns.org/