In the early days, through the use of tables HTML code was written – it seemed to be the only efficient method of writing code, but afterwards along with the rise of CSS, we renounced tables in favor of these highly flexible elements, called divs.
Now, it is mostly unmistakable that to each div associated with the HTML document, front-end developers chose certain naming for each container, just like a C/C++ guru does with its software functions or variables(1): each function represents something or does something in particular. When HTML was created, it did not have any defined conventions for naming and because of that, without questioning, it left developers writing their own(2).
Through best practices that were preached over blogs along these years, it has become common for a web document to have header, footer, page, content, column, etcetera – these all are the main sections of a HTML document and every front-end developer will know what they represent.
Unfortunately, a missing naming convention opened the door to start giving these kinds of name to the div element: a123, hTo1, aUL, etcetera – names that may be meaningful to the original creator or they may be just an ordinary alignment of characters – and which does not answer to basic questions, such as: “what does this div contains”, “what particular unordered list is here and on what paged it is called” and so on.
