Semantic Coding

There has been a movement in the adoption of web standards and I don’t mean a movement in the way of the bathroom. I mean semantic coding. I have had it presented to me and have had it explained to me many many times by Danny and Colin, two intelligent colleagues of mine. Hey H1’s are for headings and not for ginormous text; hey, that UL is actually for an unordered list and encapsulate that paragraph in none else, but a P tag. Use the > tag to begin and end paragraph content and FONT tags are like so yesterday - especially capitalized. Right? Right!?

Semantic markup is not only meaningful to developers, but very soon the search engines will give it it’s due. The ideal is that one day, other computer systems will see meaning in your code. Google, Yahoo and MSN will look at your headlines and think oh yeah, “that is a true H1 headline, it is important”. it is being done to some extent, but still not the rule. Speech browsers will see that something is wrapped in an EM tag and will dutifully emphasise it.