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Real talk: Div soup, who's hungry?

2 minutes read

Oh, brilliant!

Another website made entirely of div soup. Because who needs semantic HTML when you can just chuck everything into a <div> and call it a day, right?

Newsflash, genius: screen readers aren't psychic! That poor <div> with an onClick handler isn't a button. It's an insult to everyone who comes across it.

And don't even get me started on the keyboard users.

"Why can't I activate the button with the spacebar?"

Oh, I dunno, maybe because it's not a button, you lazy coder you! Just use <button>, you absolute heathen. It's not rocket science.

But no, let's nest 17 divs deep, slap some ARIA labels on like duct tape, and call it a success. Wow, congrats, you've just reinvented the wheel. Except it's square. And it's on fire.

Semantic markup isn't optional if you care about users with disabilities. But sure, keep pretending your div monstrosity is fine because "it looks banger."

It's lazy, it's selfish and it's making the web worse for everyone.

Now go refactor that soup before I lose my last shred of faith in humanity.

I've been meaning to write this for a while now. I've seen so many code bases that I can only describe as div soup or div hell. But the final straw was watching Figma Config yesterday where they announced Figma Sites. Here's a YouTube video with the announcement. The short of it is that you design in Figma and you publish your design immediately directly to the web.

Except it's a mess.

Everything is a div and you can clearly see the people behind this garbage had no interest in making that accessible in any way - as demonstrated by even a quick scan with any of the free automated tool checkers (which catch less than 50% of errors) on any of their demo sites.

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