What is Divergence?

I’m sorry for the very rough writing here but I need to get this out of my system (will refine soon). In the early day of the web, development was a mess. Everything was intertwined and jumbled. HTML, Styles, and JavaScript lived together.

Part One: Why we need divergence.

Because of this mess a few creative practitioners taught us to separate our content, presentation and behaviors. But, this ideal paradigm is incapable of fulfilling the needs of the web today.

So along came what I will call divergence; or convergence if you look at it from another perspective. Divergence in web development is the braking apart semantics, presentation, and behavior. However, it is not complete separation of the layers.

In divergence you can use presentation with semantics, as long as it’s semantic (not likely to happen because presentation is rarely semantic).  And, you can use behavior within semantics as long as it’s semantic. And, you can use behavior within presentation as long as it’s presentational.

This is basically a conditional AND, not OR, statement versus the boolean ideals behind separation.

For example, in HTML5 we have type=”email”. Attached to this semantic value is form validation, or a behavior; it’s ok to use under divergence.

This is true because the value email is semantic when in use and the behavior supports its semantics. However, if we were to use the font tag we would not be diverging because the font tag is not semantic and presentational, it is only presentational. And, so, we diverge font styling into our CSS only.

If we want to apply JavaScript to our HTML we can’t add it into the HTML body because it is not semantic and behavioral. The JavaScript would need to diverge. And, if we wanted to use behavior within CSS, our presentation, it needs to be both presentational and behavioral.

Under this methodology we keep our semantics, presentation, and behaviors intact while working with new technologies.

More to come later…