Comments on: Semantics is a tool with future potential

By: Andrew Cairns

Andrew Cairns — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:23:00 +0000

I strongly agree with Amber, I have to work with some really bad code on a regular basis and often get to the stage if I see another nested block of divs I’m going to shoot someone!
That being said, I do think there are times you can throw semantics out the window – for things such as rapid prototyping, but this code should never enter a production environment. “Should” being a big key word there…
I blogged about this also recently: http://acairns.co.uk/articles/semantic-markup-is-important/

By: Andrew Cairns

Andrew Cairns — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:23:00 +0000

By: Amber Weinberg

Amber Weinberg — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:03:00 +0000

Semantics are important in that they really allow another developer to come into your code and see what’s going on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to look at someone else’s code and tried to decipher what #ijfodisjf went to.

And I agree with Xavier, it’s about future proofing.

By: Amber Weinberg

Amber Weinberg — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:03:00 +0000

And I agree with Xavier, it’s about future proofing.

By: Xavier

Xavier — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 11:09:00 +0000

The funny thing is that very little people seem to see semantics for what they really are: future-proof code. Imagine that in some far future we have to convert all of our html to some new format. Would you rather have it written according to *some* semantic principle? Or would you rather have tagsoup?

Even if the code doesn’t really add any machine-readable value or screenreader-value in the foreseeable future, it is simply more human-readable. And more human-readable code makes it so much more flexible to process afterwards. It’s all about continuity, really.