On the semantic web

The easiest way to make an interface harder to maintain is to rebuild the browser badly. A div can look like a button. It can be given a click handler, a pressed style, a hover state, a focus ring, an ARIA role, a keydown listener for Enter, another one for Space, a disabled class that hopefully also blocks interaction, and enough attributes to convince assistive tech that it is interactive. Or it can be a button. That sounds obvious until you look inside a lot of modern component libraries. The visual layer is treated as the source of truth, then the behaviour is patched back on afterwards. It works in the demo. It usually works with a mouse. Then someone tries to tab through it, submit it from a form, use it with VoiceOver, disable it properly, or nest it inside a more complex flow, and the component starts leaking implementation detail everywhere. Semantic HTML is not an accessibility chore. It is interface infrastructure. The fake button The custom version usually starts like…