Alcides Fonseca.AI & Programming Languages researcher
40.197958, -8.408312

Making intelligent software
more reliable.

I work on the intersection of AI, Software Engineering and Programming Languages. Currently, I am applying Formal Methods to Agents, towards AI Safety.

Program synthesisLiquid typesReliable AIGuardrailsEvals

The Death of the Div element

I’ve given a couple of wedesign workshops, and one thing that makes it easy to explain is the div element. It just works as a box, and you have them nested. And that’s it.

Now with HTML5, there are a lot of new tags that somehow have the same function as div, but for special kinds of content. Article, aside, nav, etc…

While they help to organize the content in a semantic way (instead of using classes like in microformats), it raises the entry level on HTML a little bit. On the other hand it speeds javascript execution by using getElementByTagName, which might be really useful in full blown web applications.