All About the Web

Semantic Markup August 6, 2008

In my understanding, Semantic Markup seems to be a way that things can be described so they are explicitly understood. It leaves all of the guesswork out of reading information. A certain type of framework is put in place to make this happen. Since I am new at this, semantic markup only seems right. I don’t have any other experiences that tell me it is too slow or not necessary. It just makes sense. I found the information I read about semantics that helped form my opinion above on Digitalweb.com.

 Digital Web Magazine – Writing Semantic Markup

But, from reading “Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML” by David Schultz and Craig Cook, I have found that “choosing the most meaningful element to fit the meaning of the content inside it” is an even better way to describe semantics. This is referring to an elements semantic value. 

Semantics as Mr. Batchelder has described goes even further. Reading about the subject you are intending on creating a page for and understanding the content and what the author has in mind before you ever touch your keyboard. I think this is the most important concept to grasp. How can we create a page that is what the user needs to enjoyably and efficiently collect all of the relevant information they want if we as the designers don’t fully understand what we are designing the page for?

Here is another link to an excellent article on Semantics and our new era of web.

Semantics Gives The Web Meaning – For Machines