What's stopping me from using arbitrary tags in HTML?

Question

Even the new HTML5 tags aren\'t enough to describe structures without falling back to divs. What\'s stopping me from changing:

Answer 1

What is the goal of the tags you chose? If your goal is to present information, then using divs and other presentation-oriented structures is great. Your tags look more like they are attempting to describe the actual data. If that is the case, then XML with XSLT transforms on the server side to output HTML for presentation markup is best. Remember that a browser is simply a rendering engine and it uses the HTML spec as it's blueprint of what to render for a given site. The browser doesn't need to understand the information like a "post" or "userInfo" because it has no context for undertsanding what to do from a rendering perspective with that information. CSS can help a browser understand what you want to do visually but ask yourself first whats the goal of having your markup that way, to store your data (XML-style) or to present it. If to present it, then you should go with the standards if you want to continue to use a browser as your rendering engine. Good luck, would be great if we could all define our presentation schemes though, fun idea!