- From: Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@myrealbox.com>
- Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2006 08:00:09 -0800
On Nov 1, 2006, at 11:55 AM, James Graham wrote: > ... > To take a slight detour into the (hopefully not too) abstract, what do > people think the fundamental point of semantics in HTML is? To maximize the utility (usefulness) of documents using it. But this is a complicated function. * Less presentational -> more medium-independent -> accessible to more people -> greater utility. (Examples: people using screenreaders or search engines.) * More semantic -> harder to learn and understand -> fewer documents using it -> less utility. (Example: DocBook.) * More semantic -> harder to learn -> simpler alternatives invented -> learning and/or transcoding-to-HTML effort required -> less utility. (Examples: Markdown, BBCode, the various partly-incompatible wiki syntaxes, and any Web comment form that allows -- or doesn't convey whether it allows -- a subset of HTML.) * More semantic -> more machine-analyzable -> greater utility. (Examples: Google's PageRank with <a>, Google Sets with <ul>.) * Less presentational -> more semantically-misused -> less machine-analyzable -> less utility. (Example: XHTML2's attempt to kill <b> and <i>, resulting in more misuse of <strong> and <em>.) Many people concentrate on one or two of these effects and gloss over the others, so their idea of the overall utility function is warped. -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/
Received on Saturday, 4 November 2006 08:00:09 UTC