Have you ever heard about the <dl> tag?
A friend of mine sent me a curious blog post. In this post, the author talks about the often under-utilised <dl> HTML tag—description list that is used to denote data on the page that acts as any sort of description.
What description exactly? Well, you might have seen info cards in Wikipedia and all over the internet. Such cards denote what’s called a “description” of the item: author name, location, date of publishing… anything really.
Why would we use a separate tag for this, you might ask? The same reason we have elements like <header>, <aside>, <section> etc. They could be easily implemented using a regular <div>, their purpose isn’t strictly functional—it’s to convey semantics in a uniform way.
Without such tags, one site would have #header CSS id, while another could have .header CSS class. What’s worse, the name chosen can be arbitrary. HTML5 semantic tags help battle this problem with a unified and standardised collection of tags.
The only issue with such tags is that you have to fully commit to implementing them, otherwise it doesn’t really work. However, judging by the state of the web, how little attention is paid to accessibility and interoperability, I honestly doubt this would ever take off.
Unless, of course, ChatGPT starts rewarding <dl> tag in web search. Then this tag would become snake oil in SEO world.