Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value
coding.smashingmagazine.com
Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value
#2God, yes. So much of what's repeated about the benefits of semantic markup are pie-in-the-sky.
The link to the IRC logs in that piece was fascinating. To see Mark Pilgrim - who was always at the pragmatic end of things when it came to the accessibility debate - recanting many of the positions he takes in 'Dive into Accessibility' tells you how little of the things that we've been promised for years have actually amounted to anything.
Don't believe anyone who tells you anything about markup best practice until they can point you to a shipping user-agent that will make use of it and introduce you to a living human being who will experience some tangible benefit.
Re: Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value
#3I have had RDF market on some of my sites for about 10 years, but was not happy with available notations until RDFa which I like.
I used to promote the idea of having parallel .rdf files, for example, index.rdf with the same base URL as index.html, etc. but with RDFa life is good enough. I still like my old idea however, but without this being a standard or at least a common practice it is not of much value.
Re: Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value
#4Semantic markup is more than just accessibility for me. Even if it doesn't add semantic value to browsers, search engines, or screen readers, it's beneficial to me while developing.
It makes it more readable because you can quickly see the differences in elements instead of just seeing everywhere. It also simplifies and cleans up CSS a bit as you can define more base element styles and then extend them with classes and IDs.
Re: Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value
#5Semantic markup is more than just accessibility for me. Even if it doesn't add semantic value to browsers, search engines, or screen readers, it's beneficial to me while developing. It makes it more readable because you can quickly see the differences in elements instead of just seeing everywhere. It also simplifies and cleans up CSS a bit as you can define more base element styles and then extend them with classes a…
That is exactly the redeeming value of the new semantic elements.
Re: Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value
#6HTML5 is new enough that this has yet to be fully realized, but I'm hoping that the semantic labels help in getting content creators to think more non-linearly. For developers (and perhaps, print layout people), it's an accepted fact that the web is not just a sequential ordering of text with the occasional image. I suspect it's been harder for others to break away from that when all they see is divs.
Re: Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value
#7The fact that our current systems for giving semantic classifications to web content are insufficient does not mean that giving web content semantic meaning is a pointless idea.
It's like going back to the early 1980s and blogging about how computer graphics suck so you shouldn't be wasting your time looking into them.
Re: Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value
#8Semantic markup is more than just accessibility for me. Even if it doesn't add semantic value to browsers, search engines, or screen readers, it's beneficial to me while developing. It makes it more readable because you can quickly see the differences in elements instead of just seeing everywhere. It also simplifies and cleans up CSS a bit as you can define more base element styles and then extend them with classes a…
That is what author is saying - "Use the new elements to make your mark-up readable, not for any inherent semantic advantage."
Re: Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value
#9God, yes. So much of what's repeated about the benefits of semantic markup are pie-in-the-sky. The link to the IRC logs in that piece was fascinating. To see Mark Pilgrim - who was always at the pragmatic end of things when it came to the accessibility debate - recanting many of the positions he takes in 'Dive into Accessibility' tells you how little of the things that we've been promised for years have actually amou…
until they can point you to a shipping user-agent that will make use of it
Chicken and egg can be a problem. Someone could very well be saying "there's no point in developing a browser which can understand semantically structured data since almost no website implements it".
Re: Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value
#10I have had RDF market on some of my sites for about 10 years, but was not happy with available notations until RDFa which I like. I used to promote the idea of having parallel .rdf files, for example, index.rdf with the same base URL as index.html, etc. but with RDFa life is good enough. I still like my old idea however, but without this being a standard or at least a common practice it is not of much value.
With a decent web framework, creating a template which generates RDF from the same data source should be reasonably easy, if you know what ontologies you're targeting.
But yeah, having RDFa, there's no much point in that; clients should be able to parse the triples from it too.