This is part 1 of 2. Part 2 is my Guide to the use of Semantic HTML (HyperText Markup Language) Elements I’ve seen a lot of articles discussing the importance of HTML and XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language – HTML reformulated as XML (eXtensible Markup Language)) semantics. I’ve seen articles describing what it means for a document to be semantic. Most of these articles, however, don’t provide a serious overview of what HTML elements actually may be considered semantic — […]
Continue reading “Why use semantic HTML?” »Category: Web standards
Using standards doesn’t make it right
The Wikipedia article on Standards in software contains a very good definition of standards, particularly as we might need to view them when talking about web standards: Standards (software) Software standards enable software to interoperate. Many things are (somewhat) arbitrary, so the important thing is that everyone agree on what they are. Software standards is one of the Unsolved problems in software engineering On the whole, the article at Wikipedia is a good example of what isn’t so great about […]
Continue reading “Using standards doesn’t make it right” »Why the DOCTYPE switch isn’t broken
(Or, more accurately, why the DOCTYPE is no more broken than any other potential switching mechanism.) In a recent article, “Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8“, Aaron Gustafson states that “the DOCTYPE [is] unsustainable as a switch for standards mode.” His argument is based on the problem that many developers and authoring tools now make use of correct DOCTYPEs despite the fact that they are not in fact using standards-based, valid code. Therefore, you can not actually assume […]
Continue reading “Why the DOCTYPE switch isn’t broken” »Graph the Semantic HTML Structure of Your Web Page
In October of 2006, I published a brief article about Marcel Salathé’s interesting Java Applet to generate node graphs of web page structure. In that article, I stated: I’d love to be able to produce graphs where I chose the color coding pattern for particular tags. I could set all non-semantic tags to be bright red, to easily spot the condition of a site in that respect. I could focus my attentions on inline versus block elements, or I could […]
Continue reading “Graph the Semantic HTML Structure of Your Web Page” »Alternative Text for Significant Images
In the comments from my most recent article, “Supporting Standards that Support Accessibility,” a number of interesting thoughts were raised concerning the requirement (or lack thereof) of the alt attribute in HTML (HyperText Markup Language) 5. It’s a difficult issue. I’ve seen numerous articles around the web which discuss the fact that HTML 5 does not require the alt attribute. To some degree, this is true: HTML 5 provides exclusions to the requirement. In situations where an image is significant […]
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