Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value

Slanted and biased. I mean, just look at the author's name :)

Actually, I quite agree. The days of being able to make sense of web pages via markup are gone. It was a good goal once, but the effort has failed. Time to move on and find a better accessibility solution.

Although I agree with your point, I think you've misread the nugget you've quoted.

Every website _does_ have plenty of semantics lost in the HTML, but considering the majority of interactions involve sighted users looking at individual sites using conventional browsers, the author is correct.

Part of the issue with the Semantic Web is a chicken and egg problem. Articles like this quite rightly say that it is not widely used by consumers, but then they fall into the Luddite trap of declaring it pointless because no one uses it. If popular sites provide it, and other popular sites and/or popular browsers leverage it, then you bet that consumers will start using it.

With only one mention of Google (in which he mentions SEO, rather than anything more useful), the author has missed out on the powerful use of both RDFa and Microformats in extracting semantic information from pages to display Rich Snippets amongst search results.

Semantic language has it's limits and rightfully so. The point of communication (sometimes) is to add something new. New things by definition have no pre-defined category. Therefore some content can only be described by inventing something. It's a moving target. I guess some attempt is a good thing like having a tag, but it will never be perfect and if some day it is perfect then we are a dead species. I sincerely hope that most data continues to defy description.

Or, to put it another way, there are two different kinds of semantics in play; the semantics of a document (this is a title, this is a paragraph, ...), and the semantics of the subject of a document (this is the price of the item, this is how many we have left in stock, ...).

The costs and benefits of enhancing one are different and separate from the costs and benefits of enhancing the other.

I think there are some generally "semantic" things that are just good practice, like using logical classnames, keeping markup and styles separate, using the right list type for the task, etc. but I completely agree with the article.

It's all about readability and, call it crazy, but I think markup and code are like poetry. Imagine trying to have universal semantics for poetry...it seems dumb, right? But general practices make sense and general types of structure are good for different things.

Code and markup should be looked at the same way. This article, to me, did a great job reminding us of that.