This is going to be unpopular here, but life became easier when I quit trying to write semantic HTML. It’s just poorly designed, I’m sorry. Every time I’ve reached for a <dl> I’ve eventually regretted it because I wanted multiple levels of wrappers, or a divider between sections, or an icon, or a heading spanning multiple key-value pairs, etc. They make this stuff with some flexibility but nowhere near enough to actually cover the generalized concept it purports to. I still use the corresponding elements when there are observable benefits, of course, like <button>, <h1>, etc, but when all it’s going to do is not quite fit the data model and force me to override everything, it’s just not a practical choice.

It shouldn’t be so controversial to say that if 99% of usage routes around your API, it’s probably the API’s fault.

Sounds like it's CSS' fault then. I think that just like they introduced `display:contents` to remove wrappers, they should also introduce a way to group elements as if they had a common ancestor.

    :wrap(dt, dt+dd) {border: solid 1px}

As a person who daily drives a screen reader, I so agree with this.

We'd all be better off if the W3 dispensed with all that ideological semantic purity BS and started doing more realpolitik. Think not about whether your API is semantically pure, but about what developers want to do, what hacks they'll use to achieve their goals despite your objections, and how to enable doing those things in a way that is maximally beneficial to everyone involved.

ARIA live regions are the perfect example. What developers actually want is `document.speakText`. What developers actually have is a weird API that announces text on the page as it changes. They have to bridge from one to the other, which is difficult and hacky, even when implemented well. But hey, at least that live region approach is semantically pure HTML...