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Styling Twitter, and HTML with soul

I’ve been using the mobile Twitter site instead of the OS X app on my laptop for years. So when I got the “new” Twitter it wasn’t anything out of the blue. The main annoyance is the three column, straight-from-2001 layout, and the stupid fixed sidebars and headers; the HTML itself has been a labyrinth of nested divs and esoteric class names for years. For example:

<div class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">

What’s the problem with this type of markup? Well, for a start, it’s hard to relate the class names to either the purpose of their element, or its appearance. So it’s neither “semantic” or “presentational” in any recognisable sense – it doesn’t communicate anything to the reader. While I may use functional, “unsemantic” class names…

<h1 class="f6 mb4 mb5-ns mb6-l pa2 pv3-ns ph3-ns ph4-l c-lh-title bg-white">

… you can at least glean some purpose in them (they set margin-bottom, background-color etc.) or even look up what they mean. The Twitter markup is not saying anything to humans at all – it’s markup for robots by robots, a semaphore that speaks only to itself, a cacophony of whirring signs and impulses. It’s rude. It lacks soul.

Not that this matters, necessarily.

After all, 99% of the world won’t Inspect element or View page source; they’ll just see or hear the content itself. All of it, including the ads and the sidebar suggestions.

What does matter is that this opaqueness makes the markup very difficult to control through styling. It is what it is. You get what you’re given, ads and suggestions included. What you can’t understand you can’t structure differently, or filter.

There is a principle at stake here. HTML and CSS are inherently meaningful; they exist to aid the distribution and understanding – and thereby control – of content. And happily enough, you can make out the odd article among the Twitter trees, or a helpful attribute here and there. For example <div[data-testid="sidebarColumn"] {display: none;} will remove the suggestions sidebar in one fell swoop.

It’s odd that writing the very code we need to produce content on the web is now seen as secondary practice:

… in recent years, there’s a growing perception of HTML and CSS as a compile target, more akin to bytecode or assembly language than real source code The Mutable Web

… and I wonder whether this indirection is a cause of uncommunicative HTML.