> Make the semantic API a library. Or how about seperating semantics from component. Semantics are listed in a single file which can be crawled and only possesses meta data that links to other semantic files. The pixel level API and web crawlers have libraries that can interpret these files. This is a much better design then the adhoc way the web formed.

I'm not convinced it's a better design. It just makes semantics a separate, additional concern, rather than a frontal concern which you have to think about. It allows you to be lazy by not supplying the semantical layer at all, in any shape or form. Granted, you can have document websites with some pretty opaque form even today, but I would argue that enforcing the basic structure of HTML still keeps us in a much better place than we would otherwise end up.

I also don't think the way the web formed was ad hoc when you consider it from a semantical perspective. The most ad hoc bit about it is JavaScript, which was of course necessary due to the expansion of the web into being an application platform.

Pixel-level control sounds wrong to me as a default choice. You don't need pixel-level control in most cases, whereas meaning is crucial, both for humans and for ease of interoperability and extension.

> It's using low level components as a composition of high level components. The design is backwards ...

This is only so due the arbitrary meanings of "low" and "high" you picked here. You're imagining pixels as fundamental, meaningless atoms out of which meaning is built. Why not have meaning at the forecenter, though?

I would argue that having a semantic layer exposed as the front is the right design, not backwards. By default, you have a set of meaningful components composed in a meaningful way. One of those components can be "an array of arbitrary pixels", a canvas to draw on. That doesn't sound wrong nor difficult to me.

Does this argument boil down to the design being "wrong" due to some kind of first principles, or does it genuinely make things substantially harder in a large number of cases? Bear in mind that changing the web like this would also be an exceedingly hard effort.

> vendor locks people into html.

Which vendor would that be?

> There are other ways to display semantic UI. Html is an arbitrary choice.

I agree, but HTML is what we have and it's not half-bad compared to some other things we could have ended up with.

> Your saying ad blockers should be the center point of design? You realize that right now in html and css ad blockers aren't the center point of design. An adblock centered design implies something along the lines of replacing the html tag with one that has the word adblock in it. Literally adblockers are designed for the platform not the other way around.

Let's not get too literal. I was clearly pushing back to your suggestion that we shouldn't take requirement of ad blockers as a design consideration at all.

What I meant to say was that, given the knowledge we have today, any design should take the possibility of ad blockers as one of its central points. Ad blockers need to remain easy and they will remain easy as long as the platform forces you to encode basic meaning in a transparent way.

> You should of put your declaration of lack of understanding and comprehension in the beginning. That way readers can dismiss your entire argument without first reading it because things need to be understood first before you can make a counter argument to it. Reread my argument until you understand or take some classes at reading comprehension then you'll have what it takes to make an argument.

That's uncalled for. I read your argument multiple times and the best I've found is "I don't like being forced to write HTML." Even though you'd need only a small amount of boilerplate HTML in order to get a canvas which then gets you the pixel API you wanted.

I only realized I don't really understand your argument midway through writing that since I consider your request to have a pixel interface reasonable. I just don't consider it reasonable to request to uppend the web fundamentally -- to the detriment of the document platform facet and the use case of writing freely interoperable, transparent documents -- in order to cut away a small bit of boilerplate.

I decided to leave my comment as it was to reflect the time evolution of my thought. You may not like the style of my comment, but it's a bad reason for rudeness and instructing me to take reading comprehension classes.

> Honestly let's get a little more meta at what's going on here. Someone has composed a response that is rather rude. The responder dismisses my argument by implying that my arguments are so baseless that he doesn't "understand." Highly offensive. When you play games like this nobody wants to participate in an informed discussion. I'll play his game and say that his lack of understanding makes his whole counter argument ludicrous but literally this argument was over before it even began when the responder decided to be a rude and offensive. If I were the rude responder, I'd just walk away because nobody
cares for his opinion anymore.

I'm not sure, but are you talking about me? I'm truly sorry if I was rude and offensive, it was not my intention to be. That said, I got the same feeling about your responses to other people and the topics of lock-down, opacity and vendor lock-in are dear to me, so I may have got a bit worked up.