Re: Semantics (was : Formal Recorded Complaint)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Philip Taylor (Webmaster)" <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
To: "Leif Halvard Silli" <lhs@malform.no>
Cc: "James Graham" <jg307@cam.ac.uk>; "Robert Burns" <rob@robburns.com>; 
"Public-html WG" <public-html@w3.org>
Sent: Monday, August 06, 2007 9:38 AM
Subject: Semantics (was : Formal Recorded Complaint)


>
>
>
> Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
>
>> This argument here doesn't solve «real problems». We are all in favour of 
>> accessibility. And we []
> > are also all against semantics for the sake of semantics.
>
> No we're not.  Some of us (myself included) believe that
> semantics for semantics [sake] is fundamental to high-
> quality markup.
>

Previous orator meant that "semantics is for human" but not
"human is for semantics".

Human consumes information from the web page visually -
directly or with the assistance of Accessibility tools.
In both cases "semantics of markup" is relevant at some
pretty small extent to the human/observer. That
human is not seeing your markup and doesn't want to.

Semantics is valuable for web developers and scanning robots.
In their case (semantics == high-quality markup),
battle for semantics is a fight for the tag system that is
more compact/expressive so is more understable
and manageable - more semantical if you wish.

For the consumer of some
software application it does not matter what
language/technology was used inside.
It is the programmer who can assess the
sematical beauty of C/Java/Ruby/Python/etc.
code.

I would say that CSS is more semantically valuable
for human than anything else like HTML or any
other markup language.

Andrew Fedoniouk.
http://terrainformatica.com