Semantic HTML

Every HTML element arrives with meaning attached. A <button> has the role button, it is in the tab order, it fires on Enter and on Space, it takes its name from its own text, it participates in a form, and on every platform it already looks and behaves like the thing users press. A <div> with a click handler has none of that. It has an implicit role of generic, which is a polite way of saying it is invisible to anyone navigating by role, and it answers exactly one input: a mouse click.

Div soup is what happens when the meaning is rebuilt by hand, and the rebuild is almost never finished. The usual result is a control that a screen reader announces as nothing, that keyboard users cannot reach, that ignores Space, that has no disabled state, and that a browser’s own find-in-page and form autofill walk straight past. ARIA can put some of it back: role="button" restores the role, tabindex="0" restores the tab stop. It restores no behaviour at all. Nothing in ARIA makes a key press activate anything, which is why “no ARIA is better than bad ARIA” is the first rule of the ARIA spec’s own authoring practices, and why the shortest correct answer to most ARIA questions is a native element.

The same argument runs through the document. <header>, <nav>, <main>, and <footer> are landmarks, and landmarks are the fastest way to move around a page with a screen reader. Headings form the outline. A <ul> tells the reader how many items are coming before they commit to listening. A <table> with real <th> cells lets a reader ask which column they are in. Replace any of those with styled divs and the page still looks correct while every one of those shortcuts disappears.

Native elements do run out. A <select> is famously hard to style, <input type="date"> varies by platform, and some interactions have no element at all: there is no HTML combobox, no tabs, no tree. That is what the ARIA patterns are for, and it is real work, which is the point. Rebuilding is a decision with a cost, so it is worth paying only where the platform genuinely has nothing, and never as the default way to make a box you can click.