16 votes

The practical value of semantic HTML

Tags: web, html

3 comments

  1. onyxleopard
    (edited )
    Link
    I think it’s a little depressing that HTML has been around so long, but there are so many people who consider themselves web devs who are essentially not fluent in HTML. As someone who spends some...

    I think it’s a little depressing that HTML has been around so long, but there are so many people who consider themselves web devs who are essentially not fluent in HTML. As someone who spends some nontrivial amount of time trying to extract/scrape data from the web, it’s really unfortunate how few semantic cues I can draw from page elements and how much I have to look at the overall DOM structure or look at CSS classes or attributes. It’s basicaly to the point that I have to consider HTML as mostly meaningless, or even harmful for interpreting the content of a site. If everyone wrote good HTML, we probably wouldn’t need ‘Reader’ modes in browsers. The fact that this is a feature on a significant number of modern browsers and people use this feature shows how broken HTML is assumed to be.

    6 votes
  2. [2]
    MajorMajorMajorMajor
    (edited )
    Link
    As a developer that started out more backend oriented but has transitioned into a full stack skill set over the past couple years, I have definitely noticed that I am a bit out of touch with...

    As a developer that started out more backend oriented but has transitioned into a full stack skill set over the past couple years, I have definitely noticed that I am a bit out of touch with "semantic HTML", as the article calls it. I didn't do much frontend development until well after Javascript-first frameworks, content management systems, and static site generators began dominating the webdev world, and so I am far less in tune with the fundamentals of HTML (and CSS, to a lesser extent) than old school web guys like the author.

    It's actually kind of funny to come across this article now, since very recently I decided I was going to build up a simple website from the ground up so that I can get better grip of what it takes to write "good" HTML.

    4 votes
    1. Deimos
      Link Parent
      I linked this post elsewhere recently, but I think it (and the other blog post that it's discussing) do a pretty good job of talking about how the recent rise of "full-stack" has resulted in...

      I linked this post elsewhere recently, but I think it (and the other blog post that it's discussing) do a pretty good job of talking about how the recent rise of "full-stack" has resulted in developers that are primarily focused on other languages (mostly javascript) also being made responsible for writing HTML and CSS, which they may not have much knowledge (or interest) in: Big ol’ Ball o’ JavaScript

      7 votes